How I Found Livingstone; travels, adventures, and discoveres in Central Africa, including an account of four months' residence with Dr. Livingstone, by Henry M. Stanley eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 578 pages of information about How I Found Livingstone; travels, adventures, and discoveres in Central Africa, including an account of four months' residence with Dr. Livingstone, by Henry M. Stanley.

How I Found Livingstone; travels, adventures, and discoveres in Central Africa, including an account of four months' residence with Dr. Livingstone, by Henry M. Stanley eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 578 pages of information about How I Found Livingstone; travels, adventures, and discoveres in Central Africa, including an account of four months' residence with Dr. Livingstone, by Henry M. Stanley.

I thought of his lonely figure sitting day after day on the burzani of his house, by which all caravans from the coast would have to pass, and of the many, many times he would ask the new-comers whether they had passed any men coming along the road for him, and I thought as each day passed, and his stores and letters had not arrived how be would grieve at the lengthening delay.  I then felt strong again, as I felt that so long as I should be doing service for Livingstone, I was not quite parted from him, and by doing the work effectively and speedily the bond of friendship between us would be strengthened.  Such thoughts spurred me to the resolution to march so quickly for the coast, that Arabs in after time should marvel at the speed with which the white man’s caravan travelled from Unyanyembe to Zanzibar.

I took one more look at him; he was standing near the gate of Kwikuru with his servants near him.  I waved a handkerchief to him, as a final token of farewell, and he responded to it by lifting his cap.  It was the last opportunity, for we soon surmounted the crest of a land-wave, and began the descent into the depression on the other side, and I NEVER saw him more.

God grant, dear reader, that if ever you take to travelling in Central Africa, you find as good and true a man, for your companion, as I found in noble David Livingstone.  For four months and four days he and I occupied the same house, or, the same tent, and I never had one feeling of resentment against him, nor did he show any against me, and the longer I lived with him the more did my admiration and reverence for him increase.

What were Livingstone’s thoughts during the time which elapsed between my departure for the coast, and the arrival of his supplies, may be gathered from a letter which he wrote on the 2nd of July to Mr. John F. Webb, American Consul at Zanzibar.

I have been waiting up here like Simeon Stylites on his pillar, and counting every day, and conjecturing each step taken by our friend towards the coast, wishing and praying that no sickness might lay him up, no accident befall him, and no unlooked-for combinations of circumstances render his kind intentions vain or fruitless.  Mr. Stanley had got over the tendency to the continued form of fever which is the most dangerous, and was troubled only with the intermittent form, which is comparatively safe, or I would not have allowed him, but would have accompanied him to Zanzibar.  I did not tell himself so; nor did I say what I thought, that he really did a very plucky thing in going through the Mirambo war in spite of the remonstrances of all the Arabs, and from Ujiji guiding me back to Unyanyembe.  The war, as it is called, is still going on.  The danger lay not so much in the actual fighting as in the universal lawlessness the war engendered.

I am not going to inflict on the reader a repetition of our march back, except to record certain incidents which occurred to us as we journeyed to the coast.

Copyrights
Project Gutenberg
How I Found Livingstone; travels, adventures, and discoveres in Central Africa, including an account of four months' residence with Dr. Livingstone, by Henry M. Stanley from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.