These Bashinje have more of the low negro character and physiognomy than any tribe encountered by Livingstone.  Their color is a dirty black; they have low foreheads and flat noses, artificially enlarged by sticks run through the septum, and file their teeth down to a point.  A little further to the south the complexion of the natives is much lighter, and their features are strikingly like those depicted upon the Egyptian monuments, the resemblance being still further increased by some of their modes of wearing the hair.  Livingstone indeed affirms that the Egyptian paintings and sculptures present the best type of the general physiognomy of the central tribes.

The return journey was still slower than the advance had been; and it was not till late in the summer of 1855 that they reached the villages of the Makololo, having been absent more than eighteen months.  They were received as men risen from the dead, for the diviners had declared that they had perished long ago.  The returned adventurers were the lions of the day.  They strutted around in their gay European suits, with their guns over their shoulders, to the abounding admiration of the women and children, calling themselves Livingstone’s “braves”, who had gone over the whole world, turning back only when there was no more land.  To be sure they returned about as poor as they went, for their gun and their one suit of red and white cotton were all that they had saved, every thing else having been expended during their long journey.  “But never mind,” they said; “we have not gone in vain, you have opened a path for us.”

There was one serious drawback from their happiness.  Some of their wives, like those of the companions of Ulysses of old, wearied by their long absence, had married other husbands.  They took this misfortune much to heart.  “Wives,” said one of the bereaved husbands, “are as plenty as grass—­I can get another; but,” he added bitterly, “if I had that fellow I would slit his ears for him.”  Livingstone did the best he could for them.  He induced the chiefs to compel the men who had taken the only wife of any one to give her up to her former husband.  Those—­and they were the majority—­who had still a number left, he consoled by telling them that they had quite as many as was good for them—­more than he himself had.  So, undeterred by this single untoward result of their experiment, the adventurers one and all set about gathering ivory for another adventure to the west.

Livingstone had satisfied himself that the great River Leeambye, up which he had paddled so many miles on his way to the west, was identical with the Zambesi, which he had discovered four years previously.  The two names are indeed the same, both meaning simply “The River”, in different dialects spoken on its banks.  This great river is an object of wonder to the natives.  They have a song which runs,

   “The Leeambye!  Nobody knows
   Whence it comes, and whither it goes.”