Cornell University 
 Library 
 
 The original of this bool< is in 
 the Cornell University Library. 
 
 There are no known copyright restrictions in 
 the United States on the use of the text. 
 
 http://www.archive.org/details/cu31 92407581 2457 
 
L 
 
 3 1924 075 812 457 
 
BACK TO THE LONG GRASS 
 MY LINK WITH LIVINGSTONE 
 
BACK TO THE 
 LONG GRASS 
 
 MY LINK WITH 
 LIVINGSTONE 
 
 BY 
 
 DAN CRAWFORD 
 
 AUTHOR OP " THINKING BLACK " 
 
 HODDER AND STOUGHTON LTD. 
 
 TORONTO LONDON NEW YORK 
 
Printtd in Great Britain by Hazett, Watson & Vinsf, Li,, 
 London and Ayltsbwy. 
 
THE BOOK 
 
 I 
 
 HAD HOPED 
 
 TO PLACE IN HIS HANDS 
 
 I 
 
 CAN ONLY DEDICATE 
 
 V 
 
 TO 
 
 THE DEATHLESS MEMORY 
 
 OF 
 
 STRUTHERS OF GREENOCK." 
 
" There is a best way of living life, and it is best to live the 
 best way." 
 
 " We make provision for this life as if it never were to have an 
 end, and for the Other Life as if it were never to have a beginning.'' 
 
 " The Livingstone Cult." 
 
CRITICISM BY WAY OF PREFACE 
 
 Here begins this sort of sequel to 
 " Thinking Black." But whenever 
 was a sequel an equal? Pencilled all 
 along the African trail, perhaps this 
 fact that they were written on the spot 
 may help the reader to spot where they 
 were written. 
 
1 
 
 " Whoever reads these writings, wherein he is equally convinced 
 let him go on with me. 
 
 2 
 
 " Wherein he equally hesitates let him investigate with m£. 
 
 3 
 
 " Wherein he finds himself in error let him return to me. 
 
 4 
 " Wherein he finds me in error let him call me hack to him. 
 
 5 
 
 " So let us go on together in the way of charity, pressing on toward 
 Him of whom it is said, Seek ye His face for evermore." 
 
 " The Five Findings of St. Augustine." 
 
CRITICISM BY WAY OF PREFACE 
 
 " But optics sharp they need, I ween. 
 To see what is not to be seen." 
 
 STRETCHING the imagination to the hypothesis that 
 there is any need for a book for this preface, let 
 alone a preface for this book, it does not correspond 
 with the character of such a narrative to clog its course 
 with any " preliminary palavering." As is perhaps in- 
 evitable under the circumstances, this book, built on Living- 
 stone's last pioneer journey, draws rather largely (deliber- 
 ately and for its purpose necessarily) from his last recorded 
 words. For I still stick to it that in trying " to size " Dr. 
 Livingstone we must persistently underline nearly all his 
 Last Journals. 
 
 They are innocent of artifice. They are, to use the 
 African idiom, " Himself to him," and a good example of 
 a shy Scotchman hiding the heat of his heart in the private 
 pages of his last, lorn writing. These, the last lines he 
 ever wrote (although intrinsically episodic and discon- 
 tinuous), are good stuff. Do not, therefore, let London sniff 
 at it all as very edifying, very decorous, yet very dull. Also, 
 do not commiserate Livingstone for being alone. Heir to 
 aU. the ages, he knew that throughout this mixed-up world he 
 only is alone who Lives not for another. There is a grimness 
 in his silence on some subjects ; to him the only black spot 
 in the simshine was the suspicious shadow of " D. L." 
 
 There was murder all around him, and plenty of it — 
 also the slavery he abhorred. But not even for one tick 
 of the clock did Livingstone blink the fact that the truest 
 evil in all the wide world is cold, creeping egotism, heartless 
 selfishness. Waller, too, was the very man to edit these 
 effusions from his honest heart; no townsman he, no 
 Fleet Street " writer up," but an old African traveller of 
 the Livingstone cult. 
 
 The Luapula River, on the banks of which I now write, 
 was the last word on his lips. " Siku ngapi ku Luapula ? " 
 (" How many days to the Luapula ?") This is the 
 
 9 
 
10 CRITICISM BY WAY OF PREFACE 
 
 black riverine artery that cut off his route up the right 
 bank and is thereby a sure symbol of the two divisions 
 of this chronicle. The crossing Arabs, the wandering 
 hunters going east, all brought fuel to feed the flame of 
 his dying desire to see this Katanga of his dreams. But it 
 was not to be, not to be. That he died in a futile search for 
 a geographic phantom is less than nothing when you recall 
 the fact that the souls of the sons of men are greater than 
 their business. Not to do a certain work but to he a certain 
 thing was his African destiny in dying. Unless, indeed (and 
 there is no " unless " about it), his being was his doing. 
 
 But it is well worth a paragraph to lodge one plea 
 with the reader, a plea as pathetic as it is pertinent. The 
 matter stands thus : one thing the reader must never 
 forget if only out of mercy for us who hang on in these 
 degenerating lands. I mean, that the whole of our Africa's 
 languages from the Atlantic to the Indian Ocean are a 
 jingle of alliteration, and suggestive of the old phrase : 
 " apt alliteration's artful aid." Far from being a mere 
 whim or conversational caprice, it is the cast-iron mould 
 of this my mother tongue. And so, what would be un- 
 pardonable in an English writer as a studied straining after 
 efEect is to an old missionary his hourly and daily dialectic. 
 Glancing back at these lines, I plead guilty to this allitera- 
 tion, but claim exemption owing to this extenuating 
 explanation. No African sees sense in writing " God is 
 love " ; by the Medo-Persic law of his language the opening 
 consonant must open every other word in the sentence, 
 thus : " God is love " = " ^od gis grove," and so on and so 
 on, all alliterative and musical as a song. Let this, then, 
 be the defence of my annoying offence of alliteration. 
 
 To avoid a bald recapitulation my temptation was to 
 throw all these diaries and letters into the melting-pot and 
 let the ensuing narrative be their final crystallised form. 
 But second thoughts prevailed. I will keep my promise 
 made to Silvester Home that day we spoke from the Royal 
 Albert Hall at Livingstone's Centenary. He had just pub- 
 lished his " Life " and was keen on these " first footsteps " 
 seeing the light of day. Hence this redemption of my pro- 
 mise to a dead friend. There has been no artistic arranging 
 
CRITICISM BY WAY OF PREFACE 11 
 
 of facts and figures, no time for evolving accurately 
 phrased work. But one thing I did try to do. Finding 
 the retrospect of years far too seductive, the writer was 
 forced to neutralise this rairage by a steady resort to the 
 data of notebooks and diaries. Thus and thus only could 
 this chronicle be anchored on the actual facts of things. 
 Thus and thus only can one keep a tight hold on the reins 
 of imagination and pull back Pegasus on his haunches each 
 time he attempts a too daring flight. 
 
 James Payn was right. " The fault of most books of 
 travel is that the writer delays to tell us his experiences 
 until he has got accustomed to his new surroundings ; in 
 his solicitude to supply information he forgets the salient 
 points which struck him on his first arrival, and therefore 
 cannot communicate them to us stay-homes ; and they 
 are the very things we want to know. Moreover, he omits 
 those detaUs in which the difference really lies, and also 
 the means by which he accomplished his journey, which to 
 those who would follow his footsteps are absolutely essen- 
 tial. To find a volume of travel free from these faults is 
 a distinction in itself." After aU, probably the true preface 
 lies there in those long antecedent years before pen 
 touched paper. Haunting one at every turn is the great 
 and grave problem how to manage one's perspective, for 
 we missionaries, of all folks, are notoriously at fault here. 
 Far too often the common caterpillars of actual life in 
 Africa become the gorgeous butterflies of a missionary 
 platform ! Distance — of time as well as of place — does 
 indeed jeopardise veracity of record ; therefore do thou, 
 African Diarist, write on the spur of the moment when 
 facts are fresh and stare you in the face. Plain prose, j erked 
 down in pencil, rings out more real than a dreamy ex fost 
 fado tale viewed down the deceitful vista of years. 
 
 Finally, may I come to terms with my readers as to fact 
 not form ? Lurid as many of my facts look, the field of 
 inquiry is far wider than our available space. At every 
 turn, one finds oneself handicapped with the good old 
 literary law demanding from a writer that he school him- 
 self in the art of compression. Bluntly on such sorry sub- 
 jects as Slavery, Cannibalism, and the like, I have claimed 
 
12 CRITICISM BY WAY OF PREFACE 
 
 the right to eschew sugar-plum expressions and out with the 
 truth. 
 
 Then as to Saint David. Avoiding, as I have sought to 
 do, any slip-shod carelessness as to fact, my good-natured 
 reader must not be ruffled at this unmitigated method. 
 Did not Boswell say of his " Johnson " that he would not 
 make his tiger a cat for anyone ? And so, fer contra, Living- 
 stone's Last Journals absolutely force my hand never to 
 flinch from the high dignity of his end. Deep below the 
 Scottish ice was the smouldering volcano of the true saint, 
 and towards the end the ice is seen easily, so easily, to melt 
 and the fire blaze out. For this reason the " preachy " phase 
 of many a succeeding line. 
 
 The heat burned his body, but these last liaes of his 
 easily and evidently reveal a streak of heavenly coolness 
 trickling through his soul. Let God's will be done, then, 
 in thus telling of his last trek. Underlying a lot of the 
 superficial contemptuousness for this kind of thing nowa- 
 days, you can trace a note of uneasiness that we white 
 leaders of the blacks have, after all, only so much ability 
 for so much liability. That you cannot be the principal 
 person without having principles. And when Livingstone 
 was dubbed " Ingeresa " or The Englishman he, there and 
 then, became both national scapegoat and national hero, the 
 blame and glory of a whole race being borne on the back of 
 one man. The last stone of a pyramid is a whole pyramid. 
 
 It is late, very late, but as sleep is not coming my way I 
 am in favour, shall continue to be in favour, of so redeeming 
 the midnight hour by plying my pencil. A stubby fellow, 
 this pencil is the soul of frankness, for has it not a point 
 at one end and an eraser at the other ? As much as to 
 proclaim (and it is much to proclaim) that we are all human, 
 all make mistakes, hence this eraser ready to rub out any 
 erratum of the aberrant pencil. True symbol, by the by, 
 of what all this Livingstone business is about ; the sinner, 
 with his sins recorded in the Courts of God, and the sinner's 
 Saviour with plenitude of power to erase all such. 
 
 In Camp, 
 
 LUAPUIA RiVBE. 
 
 It is only fair to the reader to admit that some, only some of these fresh 
 facts, were delivered in the Speech Boom at Harrow, at Oxford, at Cambridge, 
 and elsewhere. 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 BOOK I 
 
 I. BACK TO THE LONG GRASS . 
 
 n. NORTH TOWARDS THE GREAT LAKE 
 in. FIRST NIGHTS IN THE FOREST 
 IV. THE GREAT LAKE AT LAST . 
 
 V. LIVINGSTONE'S "LONG LAST MILE" 
 VI. WHY HE DID IT ... . 
 
 OHAPTEB PAQR 
 
 19 
 
 35 
 49 
 61 
 71 
 
 86 
 
 BOOK II 
 Vn. SOUTH TO THE GRAVE OF THE HEART 96 
 Vin. MORE ABOUT THIS MAN . . . .113 
 
 IX. STILL SOUTHING IT . 
 X. FOLLOWING HIM UP 
 XI. ON THE ZIGZAG TRAIL 
 XII. STILL STRAIGHT SOUTH 
 
 13 
 
 125 
 137 
 149 
 163 
 
14 CONTENTS 
 
 BOOK III 
 
 XIII. ALONG LONGITUDE 29° . . . 181 
 
 XIV. THE POTENTATE PROBLEM . . 193 
 XV. THE ROAD BLOCKER . .205 
 
 XVI. MORE OF IT 215 
 
 XVII. SOME OLD PALAVERS . . . .227 
 
 XVIII. THE PASSING OF OLD "PERHAPS" . 239 
 
 XIX. LIVINGSTONE'S " LAST SPONGE " . . 249 
 
 XX. THE VATWA AMPHIBIA . . .263 
 
 XXI. THE ENDLESS END . . . .273 
 
 BOOK IV 
 XXII. A SURPRISE FROM THE SOUTH. . 293 
 
 XXIII. LEAVING LIFE BY THE BACK DOOR 307 
 
 XXIV. LIVINGSTONE'S "LOBSTER" ARABS . 319 
 XXV. THE ADVERSE ARABS . . . .331 
 
 XXVI. THE SPELL-BOUND LIVINGSTONE . 345 
 XXVII. EPILOGUE: DEAD MEN'S SHOES . 361 
 
 L'ENVOI . 375 
 
ILLUSTRATIONS 
 
 FACE 
 
 A FIRST GLIMPSE OF THE " DARK CONTINENT " . . .17 
 
 THE FOREST OAMP AND THE FOREST MATOH-BOX . 24 
 
 SOME QUICKLY PASSING SOUTHERN TYPES .... 38 
 
 LAKE MWERU IN THREE PHASES 62 
 
 THE OIL PALM AVENUE LEADING UP TO OUR DOOR. WITH 
 
 THE STERILE BORASSUS ON LUAPULA AS CONTRAST . 66 
 
 LUANZA : " THE CITY OF REFUGE " 68 
 
 INSCRIPTION CARVED ON THE TREE WHICH MARKS THE 
 
 BURIAL-SPOT OF LIVINGSTONE'S HEART . .76 
 
 THE TREE UNDER WHICH UVINGSTONE'S HEART WAS 
 
 BURIED 76 
 
 "LET THEM TAKE PUNCH'S MOTTO FOR KAZEMBE : 
 'NIGGERS DON'T REQUIRE TO BE SHOT HERE.'"— 
 
 LIVINGSTONS! 93 
 
 KAZEMBE, 1904-1919 ... 96 
 
 KAZEMBE, DIED 1904 100 
 
 THE STRONG-WILLED AMAZON TYPE 118 
 
 "THE ENOYCLOPiEDIA AFRICANA BOUND IN BEST 
 
 MOROCCO" 126 
 
 BREAKING IN THE YOUNG : ROLL-CALL AT NEW SESSION 126 
 
 " THE LADY OF LUANZA " AND ONE OF HER MANY LEPER 
 
 PATIENTS 130 
 
 THE YOUNG CONGO IN LUBALAND 142 
 
 THE FIGHT FOR SANITATION : " GUTTING OUT THE CLOTTED 
 
 MASSES OF TROPICAL SLUMS" 166 
 
 AMONG THE TYPICAL AFRICAN "SWITCHBACK" CANONS 179 
 
 15 
 
16 ILLUSTRATIONS 
 
 PAOB 
 
 THE KING ADJUDICATING 182 
 
 THE KING ARRIVES 182 
 
 TWO OLD DECAYED INDUSTRIES : HOE SMELTING AND 
 
 COTTON SPINNING 194 
 
 A CONTRAST: THE NORTHERN AND SOUTHERN TYPE . 208 
 
 THE NEW AND THE OLD 258 
 
 AUTOGRAPH FACSIMILE OP LAST ENTRY IN LIVING- 
 STONE'S NOTE-BOOK 280 
 
 A HOME-MADE AFRICAN BRLDGE WITH NOT A NAIL IN IT 291 
 
 SOME MORE OF LIVINGSTONE'S OLD FRIENDS . . .294 
 
 A TYPICAL ARAB FANATIC AND HIS MORE DRESSY FOL- 
 LOWERS 320 
 
 A TYPICAL FISHING- WEIR LIVINGSTONE HAD TO TACKLE 
 
 IN A MORIBUND CONDITION 324 
 
 THE MIXING OF THE TRIBES : SOME MORE LIVINGSTONE 
 
 TYPES 326 
 
 " YOUR HUMBLE SERVANT ON THE GROUND, BECAUSE NO 
 
 LOWER POSTURE IS POSSIBLE." 326 
 
 HOME-GROWN SUPPLIES: THIS SIMPLE " REED- WORK " 
 AT LUANZA IS A TYPICAL ADAPTATION TO LOCAL CON- 
 DITIONS OF LOCAL LAKE MATETE 354 
 
 THE THREE STAGES OF MAKING LIVINGSTONE'S LAST HUT 
 IN THE RAIN, THE LAST BEING THE ACTUAL STRUCTURE 
 AS RECONSTRUCTED BY THE VERY MEN WHO MADE 
 THE ORIGINAL ONE 364 
 
 " GOD MAKES A MAN'S FACE, BUT A MAN MAKES HIS OWN 
 
 COUNTENANCE" 370 
 
 MAPS 
 
 THE ROUTE NORTH TO LAKE MWERU FROM THE OLD 
 
 RAILHEAD AT ELIZABETHVILLE 20 
 
 THE GREAT RIFT VALLEY AS CONCEIVED BY PROF. 
 
 GREGORY 64 
 
 THE PIONEER ROUTE OF MR. AND MRS. CRAWFORD . . 150 
 
FIRST GLIMPSE OF THE " DARK CONTINENT." 
 
BOOK I 
 
 CHAPTER I 
 BACK TO THE LONG GRASS 
 
 Without proclaiming the inadequacies 
 of this chapter, the reader is reminded 
 that these lines were written on the 
 spot, about the spot, by one who never 
 wants to leave the spot. 
 
" The bed was made, the room was fit. 
 By punctual eve the stars were lit ; 
 The air was still, the waters ran. 
 No need was therefor maid or man 
 When we put up, my lads and I, 
 At God's green caravanserai." 
 
 " Lonely out here under the stars ? How can I be lonely ? Is 
 not our planet in the Milky Way ? " 
 
CHAPTEK I 
 BACK TO THE LONG GRASS 
 
 WITH a feeling of pleasure (let me confess it) 
 wholly disproportionate to my fears, I now 
 notify my arrival at railhead in the Far Interior. 
 This Elizabeth vUle where we jump ofE into the forest is our 
 last outpost on the northward route. Thence letters 
 foUow us up in brown bags on brown negro's head across 
 rivers, marshes and mountains. But there is change in 
 the air (" other days, other ways ") and the years that 
 speed past also " speed up." There is less need nowadays 
 of counterfeiting patience. Note this quarter-of-a-century 
 surprise : from railhead to Luanza means less than a 
 month, whereas, per contra, our old " buying the trail " 
 route in from the West Coast meant about twenty-two 
 months prayiug and palavering them round.' 
 
 But now the forest calls. This Far Interior is bent on 
 wrenching us out of the railroad rut of things. Turning 
 our back on this " tin town " (last and lingering memory 
 of civilisation), off we go with an absurd sense of unreality 
 into the long grass. When well out into the forest, it 
 sounded weird to hear the receding train give a farewell, 
 friendly screech of its whistle. For thousands of miles the 
 faithful friend of my (once in a quarter of a century) 
 holiday, how pathetic of that old iron snail sending back this 
 steam salutation in long and loyal farewell ! — the harsh 
 dissonance thinning down in a dwindle of diminuendo. 
 Yes, good-bye to the clanking of thy couplings, 
 clashing, dashing train ! Truth to tell, towards the end 
 
 ^ Not entirely wittout reason is one surprised at the quick growth of this 
 mining town, Elizabethville. In 1910 it was virgin forest ; 1911 saw the 
 trees felled to form a wild camp of cosmopolitan adventurers ; then in 1914, 
 lo ! a town of young homes and young babies, 
 
 19 
 
20 BACK TO THE LONG GRASS 
 
 there was more clash than dash about it. And whilst 
 the train has more dawdle than dash about it that can 
 only make — whisper it — ^fifteen miles an hour, yet here 
 we begin a life on our legs on " Shanks's pony," when we 
 are cheaply out of it at an etape of fifteen miles per day, 
 from water to water, from camp to camp. 
 
 Not to flout the academic proprieties too openly, it 
 may not be amiss to suggest that Plato's theory of the 
 child-man is belied by these ox-eyed blacks. This child- 
 man of Plato's fancy was to come to maturity in some dark 
 cave ; was one day to suddenly emerge from gloom to 
 glory, and the light of day was to intoxicate him with the 
 splendour of the tmiverse. WeU, here at railhead the 
 onlooking negro is annoyingly disappointing from the 
 spectacular standpoint. Peeping out from his dark 
 cave of Central Africa he yawns nonchalantly at all you 
 do or dare. Had he not sixteen genders to the noun and 
 twenty-three tenses to his verb before ever Dr. Johnson was 
 born ? To gush out on him the glories of this confused 
 repetition of fatiguing emotions called Civilisation is to 
 invite a reception that is no deception. What is the good 
 of telling this man you can send your thoughts thousands 
 of miles by telegraph when he thinks you may have no 
 real thoughts to send ? Or where is the utility of travel- 
 ling by train fiity miles an hour when you may have no 
 real reason for taking the journey ? 
 
 Having graciously accorded you a brief interview, he 
 soon lets you know that you are merely the spoiled and 
 petted child of a privileged civilisation. Why, what have 
 you done ? Only taken the trouble to be born white a 
 little north of his south, nothing more. Why should he 
 scrape and bow to persons with no more fingers and toes 
 than he has himself ? Even one very special incident 
 failed to force his hand and evoke genuirie negro surprise. 
 It was a train, grim little three- waggon thing starting down 
 the line. There are cofl&ns on the train, doctors on the 
 train, ambulance on the train, but it is all and only a post- 
 Paulo future enterprise. Coffins for people not yet dead, 
 doctors for folks still in riotous good health, ambulance 
 for men not nearly wounded. These travellers wiU be 
 
THE ROUTE NORTH TO LAKE MWERU FROM THE OLD RAILHEAD 
 AT ELIZABETHVILLE. 
 201 
 
BACK TO THE LONG GRASS 21 
 
 rattling on for hours yet, all unconscious of their impend- 
 ing single-track doom ; unconscious of the moaning 
 telegraph message that has come down the line (it was 
 before the " stafi " system), a message telling the hair-on- 
 end news of two mad trains started on the same line in 
 opposite directions. Many hours must elapse before their 
 cause-and-consequence smash, hours in which coffins can 
 be calmly and confidently prepared for the not-yet-dead. 
 Here, then, is a surprise for these wild on-looking natives, 
 but will they be surprised ? No, the same old " I have 
 seen an end of all flesh " fatuity. I rattled it ofE, twisting 
 in and out of their twenty tenses in telling them the tale 
 of coming doom, but they did not, would not, see the 
 marvel of a healthy man's coffin ready for him at 3 p.m. 
 when he had yet to die five hours later ! All you get out 
 of it is that impersonal stare of these bottomless-eyed 
 natives, not the intense, penetrating thing of Europe. 
 You might be something worked on tapestry or painted 
 on a china cup, so impersonally does he look at you. 
 
 The first day, after the usual legitimate activities in 
 town (spending a pretty penny), we only do a few make- 
 beHeve miles. This because Livingstone borrowed from the 
 Arabs what we borrow from both, I mean that sensible 
 old law of African travel : "A short journey for the 
 start." This, my first mention of Livingstone, reminds 
 me that in dying at Ilala he fell short of this very spot 
 by only a few days' trek. The great man had unfortunately 
 dedicated his high powers to the fictitious thesis that the 
 Luapula and its confreres were the Nile sources. Hence 
 it was heading for Katanga. Footsore and heartsore, he 
 died fighting for a riverine phantom. From the time he 
 parted with Stanley in the north, on through Fipa, through 
 Itavwa, and again on crossing the Chambezi, this was his 
 one obsession, the ca'put Nilii, Katanga or death. 
 
 Homer called the Nile " Egypt's heaven-descended 
 stream " and, sure enough, his following up this fictitious 
 flow meant more of heaven for him than Nile. " Old 
 Nile," wrote Livingstone, " played the theorists a pretty 
 prank by having his springs 500 miles south of them all." 
 Punch in 1869 took this up and passed on the easy error, 
 
22 BACK TO THE LONG GRASS 
 
 " Father Nile presents liis respectful compliments to 
 Mr. Punch, and (with grateful remembrance of the delight- 
 ful way in which that gentleman depicted saucy Miss 
 Britannia discovering the Father among his rushes, a few 
 years back) begs leave to inform Mr. Punch, and there- 
 fore the world, that the Father, at the suggestion of 
 Doctor Livingstone, has removed his head-quarters to 
 a delightful region, about eleven degrees south of the 
 Equator, or Equinoctious line, where for the present he is 
 to be found by — his friends. Carriages to set down at 
 Cazembe a couple of hundred miles or so south of Burton's 
 Lake Tanganyika." Even the natives saw what was on, 
 and this Liviagstone, who sets and keeps the tone of our 
 chronicle, is known as Walaala Pa Maava, Mr. He- 
 sleeps-on-the-waves. Every day getting grimmer, greyer 
 and graver, this verbal snapshot of him reveals how it 
 was only the pressure of ironclad necessity that urged him 
 on, splashing all the way. You smile at this geographic 
 nickname of his still surviving when you recall Living- 
 stone's own prophecy : "I asked about the waters, 
 questioned and cross-questioned until I was almost afraid 
 of being set down as afflicted with hydrocephalus." In 
 aU the literature of baffled endeavour it is practically 
 certain that no explorer ever scored such a cent, per 
 cent, success. For to have " water on the brain " is the 
 idiomatic equivalent for " sleeping on the waves." The 
 very thing he prophesied they would think of him is the 
 very thing they say of him to-day. 
 
 Once too often did this great and good D. L. indulge 
 the fine but fatal propensity of letting his high hopes 
 unseat his higher judgment. There are men who after 
 passing middle life find every plan go to pieces, every 
 expectation frustrated. But not nearly so with Livingstone. 
 Long before he said what long later he had to live to the 
 last letter, " The end of the Geographical feat is the 
 beginning of the Missionary opportunity." " I am," said 
 he, "I am a missionary, heart and soul : God had an 
 only Son, and He was a missionary and a physician. 
 A poor, poor imitation I am or wish to be. In this service 
 I hope to live, in it I wish to die." Not that this will-of- 
 
BACK TO THE LONG GRASS 23 
 
 the-wisp chase lacks one single element of sublimity in it. 
 Why forget that he did it all in good faith and better 
 company ? Did not Alexander the Great dream of visiting 
 those very fomidations of the Nile ? Did not Caesar say 
 he would leave Throne and Empire if he might but see 
 those wonderful dream fountains ? Hence this method in 
 his method ; hence the fact that fanning the flame of 
 Livingstone's life on to his last forlorn gasp was this 
 glorious vision of a sort of North- West Passage in these 
 four legendary foimtains of the Nile. 
 
 But to proceed with our chronicle. The steady swish 
 of the rainy season is over, and our African sky has 
 settled into six solid months of sapphire. Six calendar 
 months of it, sulking never, smibng ever. This means 
 much to the traveller, means that here is your old friend 
 the weather with a gleam of cordiality offering a 200 days' 
 immunity from your three eager enemies, Messrs, Drip, 
 Drizzle and Drench. It is Africa striking a business bar- 
 gain and assuring the tramp that he can sleep out in the 
 forest sans tent, sans impedimenta for the most modest 
 monetary payment in the world. Moreover, as roads so 
 rivers. Only a few weeks ago they rolled an angry and 
 muddy flood, but now they are well on their way to shrink 
 into mere threadlets of trickle. 
 
 I have no space and you no patience for all our forest 
 surprises, but best of all is our great six-feet-high fire of 
 logs as long as high. This 6x6 formula for the forest 
 fire is to guarantee an aU-night (and all-right) blaze. 
 You can certainly face the al fresco night with fortitude. 
 The morning will see you slink out in the raw air to find 
 the red ashes of this reduced roarer will warm up both 
 morning drink and morning drinker. The spot is some 
 superior part of the forest where a maniac wind has 
 crashed down several of these sylvan giants : why refuse 
 their gracious generosity in so throwing themselves at 
 you ? This, then, settles it : here's your place, now is 
 your time to pitch camp. Why be so grossly and gratuit- 
 ously insulting as to pass these old warriors of the wood 
 lying prone ? 
 
 Nor would your native companions let you. They 
 
24 BACK TO THE LONG GRASS 
 
 are all of tliein out for making a sort of midniglit sun of 
 this firewood, " forgathering as for a festival like Es- 
 quimaux about a stranded school of whales." That old 
 King of Aragon was right when he said that " among so 
 many things as are by men possessed or pursued in the 
 course of their lives all the rest are baubles besides old 
 wood to burn, old friends to converse with and old books 
 to read." Well, then, here in the far forest, King, we 
 have got 'em all : such capital Old Wood, such a capital 
 Old Friend, such a capital Old Book that we print this 
 tremendous three in capitals, they are all so capital. 
 
 But as this is not a diary, I need not weary you with 
 diurnal data : once and again we faked a food from native 
 products, and better still, tapped the trees for wild honey. 
 Then guinea-fowl put in an appearance and filled our 
 pots, five of these birds falling to one bang of a No. 12 
 Greener. Our biggest kill was a great bull sable, and 
 with this my hungry men stufied their stomachs. Shot 
 far ofi from camp at sunset, we cut him up in the 
 weird moonlight to the advancing roar of a malcon- 
 tent lion. 
 
 This African forest, far from welcoming me, has only 
 nodded a half-irritated acquiescence of my arrival. I did 
 this route by night on the down journey four years ago, 
 but this time the moon has failed us, therefore such a ven- 
 ture is barred. Farther on near Mukove there are six 
 notorious lions who really rule the road. To be minus 
 one moon plus six man-eaters is a losing transaction. 
 With a sinister impunity these cunning omnivora are 
 ambushed in the yellow grass alongside the road, and 
 yellow grass so matches yellow lions that these six sinners 
 boss the forest. One of our own boys has been killed 
 hereabouts, and all the other men forbear and forswear 
 this double dose of yellow peril, yellow grass and yellow 
 growlers. 
 
 So after anxious deliberation we have decided on that 
 not very dignified proceeding by which people live to 
 fight another day. And not in vain. These lines were 
 hardly down in pencil when a native rushed in, the breath 
 catching convulsively in his throat. Yes, we were wise, 
 
Till-: i-'oi'iKsT (*A,\ri' AXi> 'I'liK i-i)i;k>t ^[A•^^ ']i-i;i i\. 
 
 1^4] 
 
BACK TO THE LONG GRASS 25 
 
 for these " executors of the wilds " have killed a man 
 just where we passed. Nor is this all. A friend of mine 
 has gone the same way, Monsieur Michau by name. 
 I left this charming fellow farther back, and a lion gave 
 him a horrible death, munching his arm clean off. And 
 day has its dangers as well as moonless night. Hanging 
 over us like a hideous doom all day, every day, we have 
 (and they have us!) the ugly flies that give (?) sleeping 
 sickness, I mean the plaguing persistent tze-tze. These 
 are so blatant that we are forced to be ofi at about some- 
 thing to four in the morning. Only let the sun get up 
 before you and that will mean, by and by, these millions 
 of merciless " kazembe " flies will almost persuade you 
 life is not worth living. 
 
 The sun is so preposterously sunny these days that every 
 bit of tree shade is at par. Each of your men with 60-lb. 
 load on shoulder staggers along under vertical rays. 
 After the first few miles of this beast-of-burden business 
 he spots some shady river, then down goes burden, down 
 goes burden-bearer. Has he not broken ofi diplomatic 
 relations with the forest during his lazy waiting at rail- 
 head, where he cumbersomely " gent's outfitted " himself ? 
 A few days ahead he will have got into his stride, but 
 meantime every bone in his body is aching with the 
 strain. Yet instead of being in a state of wild-eyed misery, 
 what does he do ? Masking all the mutinous feelings he 
 quips out some merry, meaningless word with a face 
 wreathed in smiles, the rogue. 
 
 Then comes surprise : amazed and amused by turns 
 you see how this shade has the effect of stimulating his 
 mental processes. In sharing the shade I also share some 
 of his roadside philosophy ; it is a case of cause and 
 consequence ; shade began it, so shade the subject continues 
 to be. The tree sheltering us did it, a stubby not a tall 
 tree. And, once embarked on his homily, the incongruity 
 between his fine rhetoric and ragged get-up made me both 
 blink and think. " Look," said he, " it is the very short- 
 ness of this tree that gives us so much shade at the foot. 
 A tall tree is like a haughty hoity-toity man ; the taller 
 the tree the smaller the sheltering shade. So, au contraire, 
 
26 BACK TO THE LONG GRASS 
 
 the more humble the man the more welcome shade he 
 has like the short tree. They all gather round him." 
 
 Nor is it difficult to penetrate into the secrecies of this 
 sjnubolic speech : here is the very track, these the very 
 men I sent down some years ago to bring up the King of 
 the Belgians. And every man of them has a kindly word 
 for Viim : calls him " Mr. Four Eyes " because of his 
 glasses ; talks about his concern for their sore feet on 
 the march ; recalls how he picked up several of their loads 
 with a pliant hesitancy, wondering if they were not beyond 
 the normal 60-lb. limit to carry. And finally gloats over 
 the fact that he, yes, he it was who saw they got rations 
 pimctually, rations in plenty. All this they tell you with 
 quick-breathed rapidity, the moral being that in this 
 snobby world the beggars go on horseback while the princes 
 do the walking. Therefore, man, be humble, for he 
 is helpful who is humble : play no haughty pranks before 
 high heaven, for the shorter the tree the wider the welcom- 
 ing shade. 
 
 This is the meaning of the greatest saying of maternal 
 solicitude in Africa, " Where the shade is deepest," says 
 the mother, " there it is I lay my child to rest while work- 
 ing in the fields." Here, also, we make a sure find in the 
 elucidation of that tough old text : " With whom is no 
 variableness neither shadow of turning." The revisers 
 saw something vague here and rendered it " shadow cast 
 by turning," and they were vaguely right. But they did 
 not know that for many degrees of African latitude the 
 words for shadow, chimfule or chinshingwa, are only the 
 verb " to turn " in noun form. Therefore " the shadow " 
 is the notorious " turner " because its daily direction is 
 a turning from west to east, the morning shadow being 
 diametric to the evening one. Had that mother trusted 
 too long to the morning shade sheltering her cherub, she 
 would soon hear baby awaking to the fierce rays of the 
 sun that was there all the time, only the elusive shadow 
 deserted her darling. Thus " with whom is no variableness 
 neither shadow cast by turning " is a picture of the God 
 who never deserts or deceives us. Let the sun but shine 
 on me and the servUe shadow follows me faithfully. 
 
BACK TO THE LONG GRASS 27 
 
 Ah, but let the bright sunshine leave me and my shadow 
 leaves me too ! 
 
 But up and ofi we go, lest the sun set with tropic haste 
 and it become a case of all shade together. This African 
 bodyguard of mine is composed of tough old roadsters 
 who have the rare and whoUy enviable faculty of sleeping 
 anytime, any-where. When the initial tramp is over, 
 after considerable gastronomic exertions, we lie flat in 
 the forest, pile up the blazing logs, and soon, in a manner 
 that admits of no misconception, we are asleep in the Arms 
 of God. Not that we neglect certain pious preliminaries. 
 If peradventure you followed us up in the forest to see 
 us off, let me tell you the why and where of our " bivouac 
 of God " {nJcambi ya Leza). Not sight but sound would 
 give us away, and long before you catch the flare of our 
 camp-fires making a clean breast of our whereabouts, 
 you receive a prior promulgation in our evening hymn. 
 Echoing through the woods we make every crag and hollow 
 give back God's name, the whole sylvan orchestra quiver- 
 ing with the sound. Thus, a la Livingstone, we wind up 
 the day enthroning God Almighty on our tell-tale praise, 
 for, 
 
 " Be the day weary, be the day long. 
 At length it ringeth to evensong." 
 
 Here round the forest fixe these talkative tribesmen 
 slip into extraordinary felicity of phrase. But the tide 
 turns when as rival clansmen they start a sort of verbal 
 sparring, their favourite fad being that old intertribal 
 trick of — shibboleths ! I mean, the literal thing when the 
 African men of Gilead of one bank of a river laugh at the 
 cockneyisms of their friends of Ephraim on the off bank : 
 an " h " for a " p," an " f " for a " v," and so on. At 
 first blush it seems aU for nothing, nothing in it all ; 
 why should the very soul of him sing jubilee as he splits 
 this phonetic hair with his black brother of Ephraim ? 
 Instead, however, of this phonetic joke being a fairy tale 
 to the Arab, it has a dark and sinister meaning. For 
 to him, as to the men of Ephraim, it meant blood. A literal 
 shibboleth killed all his km in Egypt. The Mamelukes in 
 Egypt rose and exterminated the Arabs of the Said, the 
 
28 BACK TO THE LONG GRASS 
 
 passport to life being a mere consonant, not " v " then, 
 but " k," and the poor Arab died with a " g " in his mouth. 
 Curiously and almost like the Luban, the choice of word 
 was " flour," and the Arab who said " dagig " instead of 
 " dahih " died the " G-death." I wonder if ever we of the 
 northern races will be punished for our atrocities in 
 phonetics, whistling and grunting and spluttering our 
 gutturals ? It is cheap enough to indulge in talk about 
 " untainted, undying English," but practically we soon 
 find out that the comparison between English and Bantu 
 is as the scrunching over gravel to the softness of oU. 
 
 So here, away back beyond their old intertribal plunder- 
 ing, back beyond their raiding each other's territory for 
 ivory or slaves, here lurking behind it all Livingstone saw 
 the seeds of death sprouting in these silly old shibboleths. 
 If a straw indicates a current, then this verbal sparring 
 of theirs hints at the unholy hate that will spill blood for 
 any foolish phase of their tongue-wagging trickery. Take 
 for example the play between " f " and " v " : this is so 
 geographical in nature that a blind man could easily tell 
 when he had crossed the Luapula Eiver by the abrupt 
 change of " f " to " v." In the Vemba language, therefore, 
 " f " is the dominant note as against " v." The same thing 
 as what a Greek or Roman would do with a " b " or " v " 
 in old High German, and which Grimm embodied in his 
 law. The Vemba are Greeks and the Lubans are Germans. 
 Again, " g " versus " k " is as much a joke as it was in 
 Egypt, though not such a tragic one : curiously the tables 
 are now turned, and the Rugarugas, who are the Arab 
 ghillies or Mamelukes, cannot pronounce " k," but boggle 
 it into a " g " — exactly the opposite of the Said massacre. 
 Another hint this of a sort of Grimm's law and in precisely 
 the same relationship as that former : a German turned 
 a Greek " k " into his Teutonic " g." And so on we go, 
 the filing of tribal teeth, boring of the nose, the use of 
 the spike labret, often creating a new shibboleth. This 
 same Luapula (the Congo, call it) produces another hoary 
 shibboleth in " s " for " ch." A mere trick of speech, 
 yet one's mind reverts to the rivers of blood that flowed 
 over that simple " s." Who can forget the dark shibboleth 
 
BACK TO THE LONG GRASS 29 
 
 night of 1282, when the 8,000 died at the Sicilian vespers : 
 " Sisiri ! " said the Frenchman, and died with the " s " 
 in his throat ? A Vembaman, in several of his conjugations, 
 makes this very distinction ; but a Luban is a Scotchman 
 in the matter, and would have rolled out his " eh " (i.e. x) 
 with Doric joy. 
 
 It is the same old " dear dirty No. 1 " masquerading 
 ia the marshes and blind to the other tribe's point of view. 
 Paiat him white, brown, yellow or black in any land, this 
 nasty numeral is so very clever that he can never just see 
 a thing as it is. It is one of the superlative jests of life 
 that no man ever really did see his own country, and it is 
 by ignoring this preliminary postulate that these tribes 
 plunge into a squelching bog of despair. Certainly, it is 
 supremely here all the international trouble and treason 
 arises. There is no subject on which the human heart 
 finds greater facility in making a fool of itseK than when 
 it begins to prattle about its own place, own people, own 
 anything. Mark Twain has settled this subject for us in 
 his ne flics ultra manner : yea, has he not solemnly 
 notified the wide world that no means or method was ever 
 devised^by which a sleeping man could hear himself 
 snore ? | You cannot both have your cake and eat it, 
 nor can you have your own sleep and hear your own snore. 
 Moral : No man ever saw his own country. The Central 
 African surpasses even the erudite Mr. Twain ; his 
 " Thinking Black " eqmvalent for aU this is the more 
 profound " No man ever yet did bite his own elbow." 
 Make the mad experiment, if you dare ; crane your strain- 
 ing mouth to the elbow that never, no never, met it, then 
 after that acrobatic attempt you wiU call it what the 
 African does, " the non-biteable elbow." 
 
 This overhearing the African talk by the camp fire is 
 the best way of " key-holing " the family secrets of a 
 whole continent. To truly hear you must overhear. We 
 are all looking up at the stars and I make two genuine 
 stellar discoveries in as many minutes. Coincidence No. 1. 
 Looking up with some old men I spotted Venus as she 
 alone can shine on latitude 9°. One old fellow saw my star, 
 saw my ecstasy and said nonchalantly, " Yes, the Queen 
 
30 BACK TO THE LONG GRASS 
 
 (Moari) is always very briglit." Who told him that Venus 
 was the Queen of Beauty ? Coincidence No. 2. Up there, 
 too, is that old cluster the Pleiades, so called. But how 
 then ? Here they call it " tundimino," the Farmer's 
 Guide. Who told them that Hesiod more than seven 
 hundred years b.c. had the very same idea concerning 
 that very same constellation ? In his Works and Days he 
 too makes this " the farmer's guide," bidding the husband- 
 man reap when they rise in May and plough when they 
 set ia November. The identical months for our local 
 cultivators ! 
 
 I have already intimated that Livingstone sets and 
 keeps the tone of this chronicle, hence quite appropriately 
 these al fresco fellows glide down from their stars to 
 Livingstone and his end. There is neither space nor 
 necessity for reproducing all their legends, but they little 
 thought what a sensation they were unbottliug when they 
 spoke of an old woman who gave him his last voyage 
 across ! Across what ? Across the last river, " river of 
 lastness," they call it. And what was this great matron's 
 name ? Mother Kaponda is her name, famous name for 
 famous ferry. What ferry ? What if not the final ferry, 
 " ferry of lastness " (chavu cha mpeleshyo) ? She it was who 
 glided into the marshes iu her small bark boat (she ferries 
 across only one at a time). Yes ! she gave Dr. Livingstone 
 his last voyage across the last dark river. Old Mrs. Charon 
 the Greeks would have called her. They have all got it, 
 all repeat with pious pertiuacity that Livingstone is not 
 really dead, for Mother Kaponda never loses a passenger, 
 never fails at The Ferry. 
 
 Nor is she alone. They talk about a terrible old man, 
 stout of limb, long of beard, who is running a branch 
 business. Mr. Time his name, literally Mr, Days (NsMku). 
 They say this old fellow is a " One-Thiugist," a fanatic 
 wiih the monomania of Time and its terrible preciousness. 
 Long white whiskers waving in the wind, he sends all over 
 the land one clamant call. It is really a moneylender's 
 phrase and used in the dunning for debts : " Debit ! 
 Debit ! all Debit and no Credit : you must return it aU ! " 
 {Nshiku ka diilwa twanji u ha nduvmla). Hard and hoarse 
 
BACK TO THE LONG GRASS 31 
 
 is this call of Father Time, and it means most meaningly 
 that all these Mondays, Tuesdays, etc., we are getting 
 from him are rigorously handed back in a neatly packed 
 parcel the day we die. We have paid our debt. Then he 
 calls up the Old Lady and we get a free passage across. 
 Which is probably quite enough for a first chapter. 
 
CHAPTER II 
 NORTH TOWARDS THE GREAT LAKE 
 
 Put it at this : these letters, while 
 -prodigal of details in diferent directions, 
 really centralise on the claim that 
 rain or shine, here we are, seeking a la 
 Livingstone to supply that fertilising 
 influence which will induce barren Africa 
 to bring forth a flower. 
 
" Whichever way the winds may blow 
 Some heart is glad to have it so ; 
 Then blow it East or blow it West, 
 The wind that blows, that wind is best." 
 
 " Sunshine is delicious, snow exhilarating, there is no such thing 
 as bad weather, only dijferent kinds of good weather." 
 
 Buskin. 
 "All the trees are naked and the ground damp, hut the year must 
 go round." 
 
 Br. Johnson to Mrs. Thrale. 
 
CHAPTER II 
 NORTH TOWARDS THE GREAT LAKE 
 
 LET it be known, the more we get to know these 
 natives the more we find that " folks is folks." 
 The very " Bantu " applied to these negroid 
 peoples gives the game away. It is generic not specific, 
 Angels and Chinese are also " bantu," therefore no higher 
 compliment can any native pay Europeans than by calling 
 them " Bantu." Yet we coolly murder the meaning of 
 this word and use it as a selective label for a special brand 
 of blackish-brown folk, named, misnamed, " Bantu." It 
 is all amusingly suggestive of the white man's failure to 
 reaUse that there is no radical difference between black 
 and white, and his own boomerang " Bantu " rebounds 
 to claim him as its own. So, too, in some of the amusing 
 tentative maps, you see many more generics than specifics : 
 Mitumha Mountains merely means " Mountains Moun- 
 tains " ; Vyaho Plains means ditto ditto, and Mukola 
 River works out at " River River," just as Bantu people 
 means " People people " ! All very suggestive of the 
 amount of muddle that befogs the brain of new-comers. 
 
 If a deep-dyed linguist like Bleek could come such 
 a philological cropper in this " Bantu " ineptitude, how 
 much more the frank non-linguists who run in, run out 
 of much-maligned Africa. Glancing at the list of new 
 African words by a good linguist, I smile to see against 
 English, " axe," the long phrase " wa laka vyepi." Which 
 means, my masters, " What are you saying ? " Here 
 you had neither a specific nor a generic but a plain piece 
 of linguistic leg-puUing. And all as old as the early 
 Australian days when the pioneers saw the strange marsu- 
 pial hopping away, baby in pouch. Waving their arms 
 like semaphores they actioned the question, " What is 
 
 35 
 
36 NORTH TOWARDS THE GREAT LAKE 
 
 that animars name ? " Came the same old answer, " Kang 
 garru?" "What are you saying?'' Here, then, Africa 
 joins hands with Australia in a common howler ; echo 
 answers echo, and the question is its own answer. 
 
 And so it befalls. All this can be amplified : some 
 people prefer to call Africa " The Dark Continent," 
 instead of averring that it is they who are in the dark 
 about it. We first begin by calling the land an " Africa " 
 that only exists and persists in our white brains. No 
 black man ever knew it by that name. Then, down south 
 you have the natives called " kaffirs," whereas it was the 
 Arabs who first called the Europeans this taunt-name, 
 kafir = unbeliever ! Then here is a river mapped " Congo," 
 unknown as such to all these Lubans. Also, a country 
 called " Katanga " that was only the name of one man, 
 and he a smallish sort. Further : greatest conundrum on 
 earth — where ever did mortal man find a place called 
 " The Garanganze " ? The nearest thing to it is away out 
 east hundreds of miles, Bugalaganza, from where Living- 
 stone's carriers came, the Bagalaganza, really the 
 Basumbwa. But " Garanganze " never, no never, was 
 such a name known in all these latitudes ! Hence the 
 ofGicial suppression of the same and the adoption of Living- 
 stone's inadequate " Katanga." Finally here is our own 
 " Luanza " falling into the same ineptitude : passing 
 natives from far away west all say they come from 
 " Luanza." Thieves and vagabonds, per dozen, who 
 never looked down on us on the cliff, they have all agreed 
 to unify hundreds of miles of territory with the one name 
 " Luanza ! " A poor compliment to us who put that name 
 on the map and kept it there. 
 
 So it is we blunder on with brow of brass, " thinking 
 white " and certifying to all comers that our subjective 
 guess work is the real article. It is the old story, stale old 
 story of Bartolomeo Diaz. When he doubled the Cape, 
 he frankly treated the Cape in the same tit-for-tat manner 
 the Cape treated him. So while King John, away at the 
 dreamy Tagus end of the line, toasted his toes and called 
 it " The Cape of Good Hope," lo, here you have the man 
 on the spot putting it down in his log as " Cabo Tormen- 
 
NORTH TOWARDS THE GREAT LAKE 37 
 
 toso," the Stormy Cape. And, right along the African 
 story from its Bartolomeo Diaz beginning, there has been 
 the same sort of contradiction between the local man who 
 gets all the " tormentoso " and the snug far-away European 
 whose distance lends enchantment to the view. " A fool's 
 eyes are in the ends of the earth," said Solomon, and 
 many a cock-sure coclmey knows more about it than 
 the man who lives in, for, and because of old Africa. 
 
 Yet in these days of synthesis why not blend both ? 
 " Cape of Good Hope " has won the day, and after all 
 lookers-on do see some of the game. Why should Senhor 
 Diaz's fro tern, storm of 1486 be perpetuated unto all 
 generations ? The weather is not the climate of a country, 
 is it ? And one swallow does not make a summer. So said 
 Aristotle, and so said King John of Portugal long ago when 
 in his easy chair he laughed at poor old " Tormentoso " 
 Diaz tossing as he doubled the Cape. Did King John see 
 brighter days ahead and summer seas ? Did he mean to 
 teach Bartolomeo how to get honey out of the bee that 
 stung him ? It is disgusting to say so, but the far-away 
 King in the easy chair has won : after all, if you want to 
 get a good snapshot you must come back the adequate 
 distance for focus. To be too near is to get a blurred, 
 exasperating result. 
 
 Livingstone in his usual fair-minded manner said that 
 " quite as sensible, if not more pertinent, answers will 
 usually be given by Africans to those who know their 
 language as are obtained from their own uneducated poor. 
 Could we but forget that two centuries ago our ancestors 
 were as unenlightened as the Africans are now, we might 
 maunder less about our superior kitellect." Match an 
 African against a European in a dispute and the wrangle 
 becomes a smile-provoking afiair. Tongue-tied as the 
 white man is, with no linguistic ambitions, the missionary is 
 often dragged in to do the thankless job of straightening 
 out the tangled skein of speech and translate with the 
 tongue where Kipling's man " translated with a stick, which 
 is really half the trick." On the one hand, the negro's 
 verbal strength lies in native sagacity colouring his thought 
 with forest figures of speech. On the other, the white you 
 
38 NORTH TOWARDS THE GREAT LAKE 
 
 soon perceive has a mode of speech much more pointed than 
 to the point : " When in doubt bewilder your opponent " 
 seems to be his motto. Match, I say, this vehement 
 foreigner agaiQSt him and the caustic negro retorts are far 
 more powerful than flowery English phrases. Here is a 
 case proving Livingstone's point. This European is the 
 kind of man whose progress through life is marked by 
 innumerable haH-masticated cigarette ends. This good 
 fellow, having been wronged by some runaway Luban, is 
 convinced that the whole black race are liars and thieves. 
 Confronted by a wise and innocent old son of the woods, 
 the dialogue is so typical of a Ham versus Japhet encounter 
 that I cannot omit it, though I study to be brief. 
 
 " You robber you : you are like all the rest, a race of 
 robbers." 
 
 " Nay, sir, do not be angry with all the trees of the forest 
 because one branch hurt your eyes." 
 
 " What are you chattering there like a monkey for ? you 
 are all alike." 
 
 " But, sir, who would ever quarrel with all the faggots of 
 the fire because one of them smoked ? why, you would have 
 no fire at all." 
 
 " Yes, you are worse than any thief." 
 
 " Nay, great sir, you are wrong : bees may enter at the 
 one door of the hive, but they live in different bedrooms." 
 
 " All you black niggers are alike." 
 
 " Yes, we are one, yet very difEerent, and varied : a 
 bird has feathers, and a crocodile has teeth, yet both come 
 from an egg." 
 
 " Yes, you live here like beasts with nothing but a pot 
 and mat." 
 
 " No, we have not such nice things as you have in Bulaya 
 (Europe), and therefore having only a little meat to cook 
 we only get a little gravy out of it." 
 
 " Why don't you make trousers, man, and a jacket 
 instead of wearing skins ? " 
 
 " We have not got the calico, so you see when there is 
 no rain there can be no mushrooms." 
 
 " And your children, too, they are just like yourselves." 
 
 " True, great sir, what can you expect ? Like song, 
 
NORTH TOWARDS THE GREAT LAKE 39 
 
 like chorus : the chorus must be sung to the same key-note 
 as the song." 
 
 All of which, being genuine, fortifies me in the three 
 following conclusions : No. 1. Every man is a volume if you 
 know how to read him. No. 2. That brains alone can appre- 
 ciate brains. No. 3. That those who, knowing little, are 
 assured that the African knows less are assuredly astray. 
 
 Turning our backs for many a day on this last outpost, 
 it may not be amiss to say that the trouble with these tin 
 towns on " the edge of cultivation " is that they are 
 so mighty clever they cannot really see a thing as it is. 
 Many of them long ago made up their minds to divide all 
 negroes into knaves and fools, and when they meet an 
 honest one they don't know what to do with him. With 
 the best will in the world, I confess I may not be able 
 altogether to disguise my sympathies and antipathies 
 where these good fellows are in review. Smiling with a 
 finality that defies debate, some in ducks resembling plate- 
 armour and the Piccadilly poise, others with a more raffish 
 appearance, they despise learning this native language and 
 call it contemptuously " the bally lingo." But as Mr. 
 Lowe once muttered when a Member rose in the House to 
 express contempt for the classics : " I dare be sworn it is 
 a contempt not bred from familiarity therewith." Many a 
 white man in Africa spends his years fighting through a 
 fog of racial misunderstanding, all because he ignored this 
 initial claim of humanity, the negroes' right to be spoken 
 to in his own land in his own tongue. For beasts cannot 
 speak, but men can. 
 
 Yet these good fellows of the non-linguist league (after 
 a dexterously drawn cork) with airy omniscience, with 
 delicious insolence, claim to be the local authorities on 
 native men, native manners. And — Gullivers among the 
 LilKputians — they give long imaginary conversations with 
 natives in a lingo they never learned : great easy-going 
 feUows in full-bellied content and tobacco-soothed repose. 
 They boast too ostentatiously often about " a square deal " 
 all round, forgetful of the fact furnished by Kent in King 
 Lear (was it ?) how easily a bluff manner can conceal a 
 tricky action. It is from the ranks of these gentlemen 
 
40 NORTH TOWARDS THE GREAT LAKE 
 
 nowadays the number of negro critics is strangely and 
 villainously augmented. But happily for the African he 
 has a tough integument, and both iu the mines and oflS.ces 
 it is Ham Junior who is learning quickly to run the whole 
 place. I ran out with Bishop Johnson to inspect a bit of 
 farm land the other day, six miles south of EUzabethville, 
 and what did we find ? On striking the railway line from 
 the south we came on a signal box in charge of a local lad, 
 'phone and telegraph all operated by him. Then across 
 the line was the complicated pumping station all run by a 
 group of natives who saw that their engine operated in a 
 normal manner. Finally, here comes our train rattling 
 down the line wholly in the hands of local Africans ; driver, 
 firemen, and guard all waving wild welcome to their old 
 missionary as the train pulled up to take us on. And but 
 for Babel bringing about this fog of cat-and-dog clashing 
 between blacks and white, I dare insist, 80 per cent, of 
 their trouble could be explained as a mere misunderstanding 
 of each other's verbal limitations. In other words : it 
 is more a matter of swppressio veri than propositio falsi, the 
 lack of adequate nouns, verbs and adjectives doing more 
 suppressing than impressing. 
 
 But let me rescue this record from the least taint of 
 recrimination. It is a pleasure when some of these good 
 fellows speak the truth to bluntly thrill you and shame 
 the Devil. Take one of the bravest of them all, Mr. Her- 
 bert Ward, one of Stanley's old bodyguard : he makes no 
 sanctimonious pretensions, yet listen to his exact words : 
 " At the little station of L— — several white men had for- 
 gathered from the different parts of the country. There 
 were eight of us and we represented five different nation- 
 alities. A day or two previously a stock of provisions had 
 arrived, comprising among other things a few demijohns 
 of Portuguese red wine. The dinner that night was a 
 lengthy one, tongues wagged and brains grew heated. By 
 midnight things had developed into a carousal and the 
 air was rent with drunken songs and shouts. It was the 
 rainy season and the night was hot and heavy, foreboding 
 the approach of a storm. During a temporary lull I went 
 forth alone to seek fresh air. Never shall I forget my 
 
NORTH TOWARDS THE GREAT LAKE 41 
 
 experience, for I caught tlie strains of a familiar hynm 
 tune chanted by little children of the Mission in a valley 
 below. As if in gentle rebuke to us they sang : 
 
 " ' Wonso wuna usatu a mbikulu 
 
 Wonso wonso hika ieza.' " 
 (" Whosoever will — 'tis life for evermore — 
 
 Whosoever will may come,") 
 
 There you have it scrupulously from the man who took 
 the Gold Medal in the Paris Salon for his bronze statue. 
 So the day is coming when God in mercy will yet give us 
 a band of big brothers, " civilisation colleagues," from the 
 men who must lead the land for good or evil and therefore 
 lead towards the light. Like all of us Paul preferred the 
 raw heathen to his own countrymen ; I mean, the antagon- 
 istic Sons of Belial who froth at the mouth because " the 
 Livingstone lot" seek to go steadily and soberly on for 
 God — id est, go on obeying the very command of Christ 
 that rescued our own land from the doom of Africa. Watch 
 the Pauline order, please — which come first, the heathen 
 or the other people ? The Apostle puts it, " in perils from 
 mine own countrymen, in perils from the heathen." There 
 in that order of his, there in the sarcastic sequence of the 
 heathen being only hiaderers in a secondary sense, there 
 you have the old Bible pawkily putting its finger on the 
 sore spot of Africa. For just as we unify all Africans under 
 the sweeping title of " the blacks," so they reciprocate 
 and muddle us all into a mad medley of " whites," the 
 character of our colour being, alas ! not the colour of our 
 character. People talk sketchily about the colour question 
 with the innuendo that all this is on the side of the blacks, 
 whereas the contrary is true. For is it not the first law 
 of colour that black is the absence of all colour ? Just as 
 white is the concentration of all conceivable colour ? 
 
 In travelling out from these border towns we follow the 
 old forest rule and " cut down the dead loads," so many of 
 the orthodox adjuncts of the explorer are thrown aside. 
 The stagey personality with the big bill of expenses does 
 not necessarily do deeds that make history : was it not 
 Bismarck who called a certain statesman " a lathe painted 
 to look like iron " ? And some of the jaunty gents who 
 
42 NORTH TOWARDS THE GREAT LAKE 
 
 arrive here with big burdens become themselves the biggest 
 burden of all. As a concession to circumstances I am travel- 
 ling without a chair or table and have thus become a crea- 
 ture of many expedients. To mitigate the hardness of 
 the ground I find a few green leaves very inviting, but 
 oftener it is dear, dirty earth that plays the part of chair, 
 table and bed — all in one, one in all. God taught Paul, 
 and us by Paul, how you can have a high old time on a very 
 low limit of expenditure. The old Latin word for travel- 
 lers' baggage has no hypocrisy about it and the more 
 impedimenta you have the more your apostolic advance 
 is impeded. The African idea on this subject is the 
 same as his opinion about rats : " The rat," says the 
 negro, " that has the shortest tail will get into the hole 
 quickest." 
 
 Therefore, let us be men, not monkeys, for the rat with 
 minimum tail boasts maximum security. Then take the 
 boon of travelling without a tent. This means that all 
 night you are on your back with only the stars as nearest 
 neighbours in the upper flat. The burning sun by day 
 knocks all the discriminating nicety out of your head, 
 whereas here at night you perceive how the lesser went for 
 the greater to come, and God only hides a world to unveil 
 a universe. This, then, is where the logic of your tentless 
 travel lands you. And if you only lose your big burning 
 sun by day in order to exchange it for these delightfully 
 distant star-suns by night, then so, too, with this lack of 
 covering. The reward, royal reward, you get is that the 
 stars think you a sport, take you at your word, and you 
 make a night of it together — they look so near that it 
 seems you split the difference, they coming down to meet 
 you half-way as you soar up. Why draw the soul's curtains 
 and light up artificially when all the while God is calling 
 you out and up among the stars ? 
 
 We talk a lot about considering matters and forget the 
 old-fashioned philology that this merely means to look up 
 at the stars {con, with, sideris, the stars). Small ghance a 
 Londoner has to consider thiags when a pea-soup fog covers 
 the sky and stars with a pall. One of the red Republicans 
 boasted to a peasant in France that they were going to 
 
NORTH TOWARDS THE GREAT LAKE 43 
 
 wipe God out of the country. Said tMs 1793 fanatic, 
 " We are going to pull down your churches and your 
 steeples, all that recalls the superstitions of past ages, all 
 that reminds man of even the idea of God." " Citizen," 
 replied the good old yokel, " then pull the stars down ! " 
 But sun, moon and stars are all minor as we recall what 
 Spurgeon said, " Bless God for starlight and He will give 
 you moonlight ; praise Him for moonlight and He will 
 give you sunlight ; thank Him for sunlight and you shall 
 yet come to the land where they need not the light of the 
 sun, for the Lord God giveth them light for ever and 
 ever." 
 
 While my pencil is in hand I feel tempted to write the 
 very thing possibly they are more than tempted to think 
 of us ; I mean, that our brave " boys " are no doubt an 
 infinite numberof irreproachable things,but sometimes they 
 fail us fatuously. You push on ahead, but what if you 
 push too far and then the man with the roll of blankets 
 does not turn up ? Forgetful of all your entreaties, pro- 
 testations and reproaches, he lights a forest fire on the trail 
 and with the first flicker of that flame forges all the liaks 
 in his chain of enchantment. The higher his as-many-as- 
 you-like faggots leap up in the trees, the lower sinks your 
 far-away prospect of blankets arriving : the warmer he 
 gets (the rascal !) the colder the night creeps into your 
 bones. There is only a paltry eight or nine miles of forest 
 lying between you, but it might be a million : the fire 
 has him while you have neither fire nor blankets. So with 
 a sophisticated indifference to the creature-comfort business 
 of blankets, you roll over on the ground and consign all such 
 selfishness to the limbo of vanities. The loafer of a family 
 does not supply the loaf, and the blanketman is seemingly 
 of the same sort. Besides, if blame there be, you have to 
 put the burden on your own back : is not the stipulated 
 daily distance a full fifteen miles and no farther ? And 
 here in a special spasm of celerity you, yes, you, have 
 exceeded the average amount of travel by half a dozen 
 miles or more. So instead of indulging in the white man's 
 panacea of a steady and seething rage, you must fortify 
 yourself with the philosophic conclusion that the man who 
 
44 NORTH TOWARDS THE GREAT LAKE 
 
 broke the fifteen-mile bargain must pay for the pleasure 
 of his vagary. 
 
 And so it might be amplified. There is an African saying 
 that when " §ie fuddle dries the tadpole dies," and a be- 
 nighted traveller cut off from his baggage in an African 
 forest that never boasted an inn is a sorry sight. The very 
 " inn " with its double " n " reminds you how very much 
 you are " out " of it. One explorer I know turned back 
 to the ocean from near Tanganyika because his Lee & 
 Perrin's sauce supply had run out. Why should he not 
 follow L. & P.'s example and run out likewise ? True, 
 he deserted his companion, but this also was what the sauce 
 did to the soup. The puddle was drying, so this tadpole 
 of an explorer was dying for the culinary consolations of 
 London. Besides, what about that " promised " book of 
 African travels to be seen through the press ? 
 
 Once embarked on this subject, the problem of our 
 negro companions' toes is a facer : when we reach camp 
 they generally hobble in with smiling face and bleeding 
 foot. They might have sandals, but won't, and thus prefer 
 to take all sorts of hair-raising liberties with hidden 
 roots and thorns in the track. Looking at it quizzically, 
 I wonder whether, after all, the smile is more genuine than 
 the pain ? There are no nerves in the jaw muscles of a 
 trout, and probably the same Providence has given to negro 
 feet what He gave to the mouth of a fish ; I mean, that 
 modified immunity from pain when hook rugs jaw. At 
 any rate, this fishing metaphor is not a far-fetched conceit 
 — Gordon Gumming has likened an African jungle to " a 
 forest of fish-hooks relieved by an occasional patch of 
 pen-knives." And, certainly, a whole crowd of Paul's 
 commentators have missed the point that pedestrian Paul 
 was (even with sandals) also bare-footed Paul, and, no 
 doubt, in " journeying often " he went the way of all flesh 
 and got many a limping thorn to deter him on the way. 
 Hence his naming it (exactly as in Africa) an opposition 
 " messenger of Satan," for he, the Apostle, was also a 
 messenger hurrying on the King's business that requireth 
 haste. And for every helper the Lord has, the Devil 
 rushes out his outposts of hinderers, Messrs. Thorns, Stones 
 
NORTH TOWARDS THE GREAT LAKE 45 
 
 & Co. Delay the messenger and you delay th.e message. 
 That deterrent thorn means delay, and delay means death. 
 Small wonder Livingstone's " the Enemy " attacks the 
 tender toes of God's messengers with his thorns. For as 
 he hinted, all Heaven is especially interested in " how 
 beautiful are the feet " of all such. Not how beautiful 
 are their big mouths. 
 
 Walk is greater than talk ; and it is much more easy to 
 talk about our walk than walk our talk. As I write in the 
 forest I see naive Nature preaching at me another parable 
 on this same subject. High in the speckled sky is an eagle, 
 ignoblest of birds yet noblest of aeronauts. It feeds on 
 filth down here, yet it boasts companionship with the bluest 
 heaven up there. It is the symbol of royalty among the 
 nations and yet it has the most debased diet of all the fowls 
 of the air. George Herbert and Eobert Herrick were both 
 clergymen and poets, but the same calling does not mean 
 the same manner of men. Coleridge called Herbert " that 
 model of a man, a gentleman and a clergyman." But 
 Andrew Lang characterises Herrick as " that pagan-parson 
 with the soul of a Greek of the Anthology, and a cure of 
 souls (Heaven help them !) in Devonshire." 
 
 To revert to this matter of the African bare feet. This, 
 too, was Livingstone's concern : even the two pair of stout 
 shoes sent by his old friend Waller soon softened in the 
 constant splashing. When the Doctor's feet were bleeding 
 from the weary march, he had the rather short-sighted 
 expedient of slashing them with a knife to ease the blisters. 
 King James called for his old shoes, " Old friends," said 
 he, " are best." And was it not the old friend Horace 
 Waller who had sent these other old friends for his feet ? 
 Before they arrived this down-at-the-heels Livingstone had 
 written, " I thought of myself as the man who went down 
 from Jerusalem to Jericho, but neither priest, Levite nor 
 Samaritan could possibly pass my way." But the succour 
 came at last and a good Samaritan from America brought 
 both the two pence and the oil. 
 
 All the lip-worship of England about Livingstone was 
 merely a mass of glittering generalities compared with this 
 great cash-down act of this outsider from The States. It 
 
46 NORTH TOWARDS THE GREAT LAKE 
 
 is the old story of Atlas saying he would move the world 
 if he could but find a fulcrum outside of it. And many a 
 time America has been a fine fulcrum for London, the 
 common English tongue functioning as verbal lever to re- 
 move mountains. Here was The States acting as arbiter 
 and declaritig that this foreign-looking person of middle 
 height, this D. L. with bony frame, Gaelic countenance, 
 had a fame more than merely national. Had America 
 not fought the same slavery over there that Livingstone 
 was tracking down to its lair in Africa ? 
 But that means another chapter. 
 
CHAPTER III 
 FIRST NIGHTS IN THE FOREST 
 
 Fast as his five senses will permit, 
 the reader is now invited to follow the 
 writer into the new African adaptation. 
 Into that Torrid Zone set of circumstances 
 where quinine buzzes in the ears lest 
 fever fire the blood. The more buzz the 
 less fever- fire. 
 
" To see the advantages of a disadvantageous situation is worth 
 more than an income of ten thousand pounds." 
 
 Hume. 
 " / pity the man who can travel from Dan to Beersheba, and cry, 
 ' 'Tis all barren. ' And so it is : and so is all the world to him who will 
 not cultivate the fruit it offers. ' I declare,' said I, clapping my hands 
 cheerily together, " that were I in a desert, I would find out wherewith 
 in it to call forth my affections." 
 
 " A Sentimental Journey." 
 
CHAPTER III 
 FIRST NIGHTS IN THE FOREST 
 
 BUT watch how in my absence the wheel of change 
 has quickened its revolutions even here. As 
 things become more closely calculable I find the 
 Natural History changes the most natural of all. Why 
 should these " let your heart beat " quadrupeds drift into 
 acquiescence of their own extermination 1 And no sooner 
 do you get the new situation in focus than you see how the 
 bigger antelopes around this urban atrocity have taken 
 French leave. Elands, kudus, hartebeest, sable, pallah 
 are all ofi for cover more than a hundred miles from the 
 swinging dining-car that rattles and rocks with a thousand 
 vibrations. Smiling sourly at this desertion, now it is 
 their despised juniors supersede the absentee seniors — 
 conies, hares, jerboas, foxes, earth-pig, wart-hog, hyaenas, 
 jackals, porcupines and shrews all gloryiag in the law of 
 compensation that they are too insignificant to merit 
 extinction. Another proof that " distinction only invites 
 extinction," and (again a local proverb) " the taller the 
 tree the more it must meet the blast of the storm." 
 
 The final factor in Africa's unity of charm is this camp of 
 ours so near the mushroom town at railhead. If forests 
 canthink,if townshave thoughts, then this forest and yonder 
 proximal tin town must have many rueful reflections 
 concerning this dramatic jumble of yesterday and to-day. 
 To be near as to place can mean distant as to time, and 
 this six-miles-ofE forest is really six thousand years aloof 
 in men and manners. It is a case of trying to co-naturalise 
 Pharaoh of the Moses period and a modern tripper sitting 
 on a fallen tree, " Adam's arm-chair," eating sardines 
 together. The train led up to the tin town that produced 
 this other tin with the fish in it. 
 
 4 49 
 
50 FIRST NIGHTS IN THE FOREST 
 
 And in the forest you find many a primitive and patri- 
 archal Pharaoh of the genuine B.C. brand. If forests can 
 think, if towns have thoughts, then every time this two- 
 penny tin town prates its " Poor African forest " the sylvan 
 dignity of the latter freezes the adjective on the lips of the 
 brick-built boaster. For many marvellous moons here 
 you had a forest fulfilling its functions in a modest but 
 capable way ; shade from the sun, logs for a hut, faggots 
 for the fire and steaks for the soup. Then only the other 
 day the vandalism began when up from the south came those 
 two bars of encroaching steel — and everything happened 
 at once. For rolling on them you have, smooth and easy 
 and iasulticLg, the transport wheels that do all the damage : 
 wheels ? When in all its centuries as a continent had 
 Africa such a rotary runaway ? 
 
 Lying like a log beside your faggot fire, if you only keep 
 quiet enough you can hear the fine old forest dinning 
 it in your ears that it has a tongue in its head. It is 
 neither fluency nor flippancy, but its case against the town 
 amounts to the old trouble with all sorts and sizes of towns, 
 " the axis of the earth sticks out far too visibly through 
 the centre ! " Those straight unrelenting streets are only 
 an annoying instance of the axle hitting you in the eye. 
 The earth's axle, at any rate, is invisible out here in the 
 forest. There is not a straight line in Nature, so this 
 stubborn straightness should be as absent to the human 
 eye as the ever-elusive axle. So, too, with the exasperating 
 extremes of a spick-and-span West-End laughing at its 
 East-End antithesis all asmear with dirt and disease. 
 
 Johannesburg, far south, is probably the best and cer- 
 tainly the biggest of these African artificial agglomerations 
 of mankind. The city is built high on the reef and, at 
 night, its miniature Oxford Street is ablaze with many 
 small Selfridges. Yet all the time you have thousands of 
 natives, down a mile deep in the dark caves working 
 away to the glimmer of their lamps. Picture the contrast : 
 the outside glare and glitter of the street and the never- 
 needless negro, far below it all, drilling and blasting in the 
 ghostly gloom. Some of the company-promoting gentle- 
 men who emerge from these mining enterprises with a fat 
 
FIRST NIGHTS IN THE FOREST 51 
 
 dividend could no more copy these blacks than milk the 
 cow that jumped over the moon. But these good fellows 
 of the Corner House are at least frank, and their Parktown 
 across the reef has no hypocrisy about its iatentional 
 isolation. Mark that phrase about Parktown being " across 
 the reef " ; I use these last three words with intention. 
 It tickles you to see that same reef of gold still separating 
 the rich and poor by night, the self- same reef of gold that 
 all day, every day is a barrier in business relations. Other 
 cities politely put their poor in the East and hedge off 
 patricians in the West, but here you have frank and 
 fashionable Johannesburg building on a reef of gold ; 
 then, on either side of the barrier reef, sorting out 
 scientifically " The Haves " and " The Have Nots." 
 
 In other words, Parktown to the townsfolk of Fordsburg 
 is Johannesburg's " better land far, far away." Masterton 
 was right : in brilliant bitter talk it is discussed sometimes 
 with impatience, sometimes with deliberation, whether 
 this city-conception is the final word in the matter. If 
 the desirable things which are possible to human experi- 
 ence are always to be sacrificed to Accumulation or 
 Acceleration, or a joyless extravagance, or (at the bottom) 
 a mere animal struggle for food and shelter ? And, alas, 
 Civilisation, in reply, speaks with voice less certain than 
 in former days ; being itself perplexed why, after the 
 long journey has been attempted and all the modern 
 miracles achieved, it cannot at least see clearly on the 
 horizon the walls and towers of the Golden City of men's 
 dreams. 
 
 Here, again, Nature (i.e. my forest) attacks the town in 
 its most nasty manner for creating such emphatic rags- 
 and-riches extremes : where in any forest of any land do 
 you discover such annoying antitheses ? True, until you 
 kill your sundown buck for the camp pots it is a 
 case of feast or famine. But, then, all feast, or all 
 are famished. Get far enough from the town and the 
 old earth soon puts you all on equal rations ; the 
 food goes round, at any rate, because the quality is 
 levelled down to the quantity. When Thales at the dawn 
 of history picked out water as the primal and final phase 
 
52 FIRST NIGHTS IN THE FOREST 
 
 of all things, it was because H2O was as perfect in quality 
 as quantity : there is plenty of it and pure as plentiful. 
 So spake my invincibly voluble old forest unto me with a 
 wily exploitation of good points and an equally careful 
 neutralisation of weak ones ! More artful than actual : 
 not the whole truth, but neither is it wholly untrue. 
 
 The first time I prayed in the forest with my natives 
 round the flickering camp-fire was a memorable date. 
 Every moment was a memento. Overhead the diamond 
 stars blazing through the night. In the forest the hushed 
 silence of my men squatting in groups, spears stuck point 
 downwards in the ground. Small wonder if one's voice 
 quavered in a queer little choke. But it is the great African 
 moon, I think, that makes memory so measureless, so 
 mighty. My mother far away in Scotland saw the same 
 moon but not the same stars. And " mother " means 
 " memory." Is not the moon a mere memory of the sun ? 
 Therefore like memory,is not moonlight the reflection of rays 
 emanating from an object no longer seen ? Small wonder 
 memory erects its screen in the African moonlight, and 
 flashes the ex post facto moving pictures thereon. They 
 are both alike, moon and memory, both merely the reflec- 
 tion of reminiscent rays shed by something no longer 
 visible. It was when David saw the moon (not the sun) 
 that the memory of his mediocrity began to grip him : 
 " When I consider . . . the moon " ; " what is man that 
 Thou art mindful of him ? " And if " night " in the dialect 
 of Holy Writ means the trials and troubles of life, then is 
 it not written that the moon was given to rule the night ? 
 The moon of memory still reflecting the rays of good days, 
 good deeds, good desires, no longer visible. More than that ; 
 it rules the night, and the myriad memories of the good 
 piled up in the past conquer the sorrows of the present, 
 and pledge a fine future. 
 
 But after all, it is the splendid stars that have a last 
 look in. Before dropping over we have a quaint " Morning 
 Star pass- word " repeated round the fires : this " Lutanda " 
 means that we who are about to sleep hereby give honest 
 rendezvous to be up and ofi with the Morning Star. Each 
 recumbent group sends round the warning " Lutanda ! " 
 
FIRST NIGHTS IN THE FOREST 53 
 
 (tte Morning Star), then over they drop snoring steadily to 
 the stars. Huddled up in somnolent attitudes you can 
 hear one man after another, more asleep than awake, pass 
 it on as his solemn sort of last will and testament for the 
 day, " Lutanda ! " What a picture of all who fall asleep 
 in Jesus : they, too, rest from their labours with that word 
 on their lips ; they, too, will rise with " The Morning 
 Star." 
 
 Lowell spoke of " the roaring loom of Time," and it 
 roars all the louder here in the forest when the silence is 
 deepest. " Isn't the noise of the machines awful ? " was 
 the question put to a young factory worker. " Yes," 
 he replied, " but not so much when they are going on as 
 when they stop." This is what any man feels in the forest 
 after having been swept out of the swirl of the town with 
 its everlasting roar. The silence makes it 1,000,000 miles 
 ofi and the science of sound agrees with the science of soul ; 
 we only hear up to the limit of 40,000 vibrations in a second. 
 Below this boundary when the vibrations are at their 
 fewest the sound is deepest, and as you ascend beyond the 
 40,000 limit this shrieking sense of auricular sharpness gets 
 so keen that it kills itself in the soundlessness of a sound we 
 caimot contain. Thus the higher the sound the more 
 certain our incapacity of hearing the same. Put it thus : 
 Mr. Smith and The Sound of Mr. Smith are alike in this, 
 that if Smith roars loud he won't roar long, and the 
 shriller Smith's sound the shorter Smith's shriek. " Never 
 less alone than when alone " is true in many more ways than 
 one : the more subdued the silence the surer you can 
 be that this forest's volume of sound is so superlative that 
 our earthly limitations are incapable of containing the 
 same. 
 
 Our own dead-and-gone Goldsbury put it all rather well. 
 " It would be the task of a genius to point out the one 
 definite factor in the charm of the country. And yet this 
 definite charm, though intangible, undoubtedly exists. 
 Maybe it lies in the sense of infinite space, of utter, vast 
 loneliness. So far as the eye can reach there is nau ght 
 but the exuberance of vegetation : tall, tangled grasses — 
 tufted trees, fantastic antheaps, the primeval rock — these 
 
64 FIRST NIGHTS IN THE FOREST 
 
 and nothing more. Here and there, a pin-point in the 
 wilderness, lie little clusters of thatched huts, wreathed in 
 a mist of smoke — tiny patches of human life and human 
 thought hedged about with gardens, wrested from the void. 
 And, outside, the dim, inscrutable silence of the virgin land 
 where great beasts move noiselessly in the twilight, and 
 where every twig and blade teems with insect life. But 
 it is mere presumption to seek to analyse the attributes 
 of such a land ; the presumption of the pigmy who should 
 essay to paiat a giant. In the cities, perhaps — in London, 
 Paris, New York — man is in his own domain. There he 
 may classify, schedule, arrange to his heart's content. 
 Here, in the bosom of the wonderful wilderness, he can only 
 pause, humble or terrified according to his nature — can only 
 live tentatively, as it were, with the knowledge that the 
 elemental forces have hita in their grip." 
 
 Here is the ugly way to make trouble. Having just 
 (May 12, 1915) crossed America from Maine to Mexico, 
 I rather shivered at the deliberate delusion some good 
 fellows in Africa foster as to the incapacity of the black 
 man. As evidence : One " Transvaaler " runs into print 
 with, " For over a hundred years now the blacks (in 
 America) have had the finest possible opportunity for a 
 thorough education ; and what has been the result ? 
 Out of all the millions there, Booker Washington was the 
 only one who rose to some degree of distinction.'' Then in 
 the same February you find the Johannesburg Star frankly 
 and fairly declaring that " the American negroes have 
 31,363 churches, valued at upwards of £5,000,000 sterling 
 . . . the negro has by labour and thrift acquired 20,000,000 
 acres of land as his own ; he has 500,000 homes of his own, 
 64 banks, and 396 newspapers and periodicals. He is 
 not merely a proletariat, but is becoming a peasantry 
 owning both land and house. There are 4,000 duly qualified 
 negro physicians, 2,000 negro lawyers, 1,000 trained nurses, 
 an educated clergy, a trained body of agriculturists, and 
 many thousand primary schools." 
 
 Or take the jibe against the education of the native : 
 " 75 per cent, of the native criminals in our gaols are 
 educated ones," is the cheap ad caytardum criticism. But 
 
Statute Mil^s 
 
 THE GREAT RIFT VALLEY AS CONCEIVED BY PROF. GREGORY. 
 
 Right down from Lebanon and through the canyon of the Jordan and Dead 
 .Sea the Great Rift Valley has seven sections, probably as tar south as Lake 
 
 Mweru. [Page 62 
 
 54] 
 
FIRST NIGHTS IN THE FOREST 
 
 55 
 
 when you get home to facts and figures, this cool " 75 
 per cent." soon evaporates into very thin air. Inquiry 
 was made by le Roy at six of the largest prisons of Natal 
 and Zululand, and the result was the following statis- 
 tics : 
 
 Prisons. 
 
 Date. 
 
 Prisoners. 
 
 Literate. 
 
 Durban . 
 Maritzburg 
 Eshowe . 
 3 smaller prisons 
 
 April 17 to May 6 
 May 19 
 May 19 
 May 19 
 
 260 
 
 507 
 
 214 
 
 43 
 
 1,024 
 
 2 
 
 31 
 13 
 
 
 
 46 
 
 Of almost 2,000 native criminals received at Durban 
 gaol, during the two years ended December 31, 1905, only 
 500, or 25 per cent., were sufl&ciently educated to be able 
 to read the Fourth Reader. Statistics these good fellows 
 want, and now when they get them they do not like them, 
 as there is no small discrepancy between " 75 per cent." 
 and this poor fraction of figures. Is this a gauge of the 
 validity of some of their own mining statistics — some, not 
 all ? When the Lord Mayor of London paid his annual 
 visit to the Law Courts what did the Lord Chief Justice 
 tell him ? Deploring the need for a crusade for commercial 
 integrity in the City, he cited from this very Africa a 
 case of impudent fraud ; a case, said the Lord Chief 
 Justice, in which a property was sold, or at least purported 
 by the vendor to be sold in Africa, for the sum of £48,000, 
 when there was no property in existence at all. But an 
 agent was sent out after this fictitious sale had been 
 effected, whose report recorded the purchase of a property 
 for the sum of £140 from a native negro chief, which the 
 agent thought would nearly answer the description given 
 of the fictitious property described in the prospectus ! 
 
 Those stars again. I tried for hours to get some venison 
 for our gaping camp pots, but all the antelopes seem to 
 have had a prior engagement. In vain. Dog-weary with 
 hunting I lie like a log and see my confrere, Orion the hunter, 
 glimmering in the sky. He gets out of it cheaply enough, 
 
56 FIRST NIGHTS IN THE FOREST 
 
 for Jbis hunting is a hoax. A first-class fraud, this constella- 
 tion winks down at each accusation I assail him with. The 
 more I upbraid him for boasting a hunting record he 
 never had, so much the more does he without a conscience 
 wink back at me most wickedly, most waywardly. Far 
 from feeling lonely, surely these are the least forlorn 
 moments in life. Civilisation away south has sent us to 
 Coventry, yet here in the heart of the wilds give me my 
 es'prit de corfs with these nebular neighbours of mine. 
 " Lonely 1 Why should I feel lonely ? Is not our planet 
 in the Milky Way ? " 
 
 One of the best features of these heavenly bodies is that 
 they belong to everybody and in this they resemble the 
 earth I lie on. We pay for neither board nor Light and the 
 bed is as broad as the earth it is made of. In this big bed 
 we are all born and buried ; it is as much made for us as 
 we of it. You cannot read books under the stars nor can 
 you barter real starlight for the artificial aid of a reading 
 lamp . For as sure as night only blots out the ear th to reveal 
 a universe, so the reading lamp and the book read by that 
 lamp is a cheap quack when measured with my spacious 
 stellar library whose light is its own literature. When- 
 ever did a bookseller give away a candle and a box of 
 matches with each copy sold ? Yet here you have my cheap 
 constellation giving gratis light both literal and mental. 
 
 This explains why even the artifice of a chair is unworthy 
 of a devout star-gazer. With face full up at the galaxy 
 you lie flat on the ground because there is not a lower 
 posture possible. In this reptilian attitude the longer you 
 gaze the stronger grows the feeling that, seeing you were 
 born and bred to this subastral situation, the " sub " 
 part of the position should be as superlative as the ground 
 will admit. Until one day the very man who lay low 
 on the ground looking up at the stars to get a better view 
 will die and go lower still to get the best view of all. For 
 every time the forest tramp stretches himself on the ground 
 to sleep off arrears, does he not so symbolise his longer 
 sleep when all his trekking ends ? So still I lie like a log, 
 and still my shameless constellation. The Hunter, winks 
 down at a more real hunter than he. 
 
FIRST NIGHTS IN THE FOREST 57 
 
 There is subtle charm in this gipsying the forest. Sir 
 Arthur QuUler-Couch has said recently that, among the 
 fascinating books which have never been written, his 
 favourite, he thinks, is a history of trade routes from 
 the earliest times. He lets his imagination play upon these 
 trade routes, and sees the dotted ships on the wide seas, 
 the crawling trains of emigrant waggons, the tribes on the 
 trail, and men extinguishing their camp fires and shoulder- 
 ing their baggage for another day's march, families loading 
 their camels with dates and figs for Smyrna, fishermen 
 hauling their nets, and desert caravans with armed out- 
 guards. And, in later centuries, Greenland sailors and the 
 trappers round Hudson Bay, and the puffs of smoke as the 
 expresses thunder across Siberia and Canada and run north- 
 ward from Cape Town. Then, passing from trade in its 
 narrower sense, comes commerce of other sorts which has 
 travelled along the roads and across the oceans of the world ; 
 how the seed of a wild flower lodges in the boot sole of a 
 soldier and the boot reaches Dover and plods on and wears 
 out and is cast by the way and rots in a ditch, and next 
 spring Britain has gained a new flower ; how the wandering 
 scholars of the Middle Ages, young and poor, packed their 
 knapsacks and set forth for the great Universities, each of 
 them echoing the wistful cry of Augustine, " Oh, truth, 
 truth, thou knowest that the inmost marrow of my soul 
 longeth after thee." These routes and roads and seas, 
 and the wayfarers and voyagers across them, are an en- 
 trancing spectacle. They speak of the unappeasable 
 aspirations of men, and the desire of the mob for the law, 
 and the passion of our nature to forget the things that 
 are behind and to reach forth to the things that are before. 
 
CHAPTEE IV 
 THE GEEAT LAKE AT LAST 
 
 This is only another instance of 
 the disturbing difference between being 
 effectual and efficient. It numbers not 
 one but two chrysalis changes in its 
 caree'r : the grub stage, very grubby 
 stage, evolved from a stubby -pencil out in 
 the bush ; then the typing of the same 
 by my black boy at the Luanza base. 
 
When Dr. Laws gave up Cape Maclear Mission Station to go 
 north and found Livingstonia, " up in the jungle,'" says the author of 
 his Life, " on the hillside, the baboons sat and witnessed the departure, 
 and their raucous barking was more like jeering laughter than ever. 
 It seemed to say, ' We told you so.' And in Scotland many human 
 beings counted the Mission a failure. They tabulated the first five 
 years by methods of book-keeping : 
 
 LIABILITIES. ASSETS. 
 
 5 European graves. 1 convert. 
 
 5 years' expenditure, £20,000. 1 abandoned station. 
 5 years' hardship and toil. 
 
 A single Christian, one station, which had proved a white man's 
 grave, given up ; and everywhere seething masses of heathenism, 
 slave drives, war raids, tribal fights, and poison ordeals. Surely 
 it was a pitiful fiasco ! " 
 
 Laws of Livingstonia. 
 
CHAPTER IV 
 THE GREAT LAKE AT LAST 
 
 A LOT of the land we covered was depopulated and 
 abandoned to sun and silence. Thus the days 
 rush past, and at last here we are at Mulangadi's 
 where the homeward run to Luanza begins. The rivers 
 now begin to flow towards the Lake (flow, that is to say, 
 in the direction we are going), and one glad day a flash of 
 blue on the right reveals the south end of Lake Mweru. 
 Struck by its interest more than its beauty, the thrill with 
 which one looks on this Lake is really a triple thing com- 
 pounded of Geography, Geology and even Theology. For 
 here probably you strike the edge of the Great R3t Valley 
 that extends from Northern Palestine right down thus 
 far. Apart from the mere promptings of a healthy human 
 curiosity, Professor Gregory of the Royal Society (in a 
 manner by no means deficient in persuasiveness !) is 
 quite competent to affirm that perhaps even here in Lake 
 Mweru you have the self-same rift that begins away up 
 in Lebanon and splits down the canyon of the Jordan and 
 Dead Sea. Besides, who cares to ignore the inferred 
 compliment contained in this tremendous theory that ties 
 up nearly all our great African lakes in the same bundle 
 as Christ's own Jordan ? A little laboured, no doubt ; 
 a little visionary, but what sort of labour can you accom- 
 plish without the vision ? 
 
 The practical part of all this theory of earth-fractures 
 explains the steady drying-up process menacing the whole 
 Great Lake system of Africa. For granted you can postu- 
 late such a vast region seamed by deep vertical cracks or 
 faults, then is it easy to see how the surface water-supplies 
 are lost underground. Yet even with all this going on. 
 Lake Nyasa around Nkata can give 430 fathoms' soimdings. 
 
 61 
 
62 THE GREAT LAKE AT LAST 
 
 That is to say, although the whole of the Lake were to run 
 out, the boats would still have a marginal 1,000 feet of 
 water to float on, for the bottom of the Lake is something 
 over a thousand feet below the level of the sea ! This 
 Great Rift Valley, of course, is of unguessable age, and 
 Professor Gregory mentions many millions of years as 
 though it was all a homely matter of parochial common- 
 place. Was there no cMU of apprehension when his 
 time-table pushed it all back to the day when East Africa 
 and India were included in a continent extending from 
 Brazil to Australia ? Were there no manifest grunts and 
 wheezes when this continent was named, a la the Postal 
 Guide, Gondwanaland 1 That it lasted all through the 
 Carboniferous period as a mainland joining Africa and 
 India ? That this terra firma called Gondwanaland soon 
 began to break up ; became, I mean, so doubtfully firma 
 that the terra followed the firma 1 That, in fact, it went 
 into literal liquidation when the sea invaded the coastlands 
 of India and of East Africa ? And then the fireworks, 
 when the floor of the Indian Ocean foundered and the 
 volcanoes finished it all ? ' 
 
 But is it necessary to premise all this ? The time-table 
 may be artful but the Great Rift is actual. Writing as I 
 do on its very edge (?) at Lake Mweru, I venture to make 
 one point endorsive of Professor Gregory's strong case for 
 the unification of this far-ofi Mweru with its northern con- 
 freres, Victoria and Albert Nyanza, Mere Philology is a 
 very remote handmaid to Geology, but in this case there 
 are four angles of approach that all converge in upon 
 and unify our Great Lake system. The first is found in 
 the fact that (1) precisely as Victoria has its " satellite 
 sea " in Albert, so Lake Mweru here has its corresponding 
 Lake Bangweulu. Then (2) comes the curious identity 
 of name linking " Albert " (so-called) Nyanza with Mweru : 
 up north, Dueru is its own native name, just as Mueru 
 is the name of our Southern Lake here ; same root, same 
 meaning, eru — a large glistening sheet of water. But 
 
 ^ Before the reader smiles at all this, let him recall how long after the 
 Pyramids were built there was no North Sea and men walked from 
 Yorkshire to Denmark. 
 
LAICK .UWKKL' FN 'nfl.'KK l'II.\SI-:s 
 
 .021 
 
THE GREAT LAKE AT LAST 63 
 
 (3) this is only half the coincidence, for just as this soi- 
 disant Lake Albert has a sort of surname sufl&xed to its 
 Dueru, so, too, has Mueru the same sort of suffix tagged on 
 to its fixst name. Then (4) this so-called surname (presto !) 
 is the self-same thing in both these far-removed inland seas 
 and means "The locust killer" {Luta Nzige = Muvunda 
 Nshe) , because " the locust swarms when attempting to cross 
 these lakes fall from fatigue into the water in myriads," 
 Add to all this, the curious resemblance in contour between 
 Dueru and Mweru, then add again the fact that both these 
 aqueous satellites lie off at the same sort of N.W. angle 
 from their aquatic seniors, and the whole thing looks 
 absurdly authentic in analogy. 
 
 Am I too conservative of details as to direction ? Our 
 route north is too direct to be devious. The blue wall of 
 Kimdelungu ahead is seen closing in on the Lake and there 
 are deep canons all along the edge of this Range, Down 
 in the Dantesque darkness there lurks a rare hamlet hidden 
 among landolphia vines and the overhanging clifis are 
 crested with a fringe of noble trees. This means that far 
 below all the canon cocks crow much later than their fellows 
 out in the open : long ago the savannahs are flooded with 
 warm morning sunlight, the correct cocks going by solar 
 clock and punctually saluting the sun. Not so deep down 
 among the dark rocks of the glens ; sun peasants and birds 
 are all late. " Slug-a-beds " you might call them, only they 
 retort that it is King Sol who is the late riser. But the 
 best bit lies in the tribal fact that they in puris naturalibus 
 see a moral meaning in it and sing a song that platitudinises 
 this sjntnbolic action of the sun. Mark you, it is not the 
 moralising missionary but they themselves who put it : 
 Bwa cha hala, cha chinga ni ngulu. Which means : " Look 
 out yonder through the canon mouth, the warm plains 
 bathed in morning sunlight. That's Europe far away, 
 kissed with the sunshine of life's good things. But con- 
 trast our dark cold ravine with no belated sun yet awhile. 
 That's Africa, black den of black people who have not got 
 their sun yet. But it's coming, oh yes it's coming, and 
 soon the symbolic sun will be over the rim of the Range, 
 then our parabolic cocks will crow ! " The trouble about 
 
64 THE GREAT LAKE AT LAST 
 
 this parable is that it is true even in its ultimate details. 
 The pinching part lies in the bursting in on them of an 
 angry belated sun, not the pale easy thing of daybreak 
 but a fierce nine-in-the-morning sun sending down burning 
 bolts. There you have a true-to-the-life snapshot of the 
 ugly African mining booms with their terrors of transition, 
 and surely this is proof positive that the African in a parable 
 of his own making calls his Africa " The Dark Continent " ? 
 
 It will readily be recalled that our destination ahead on 
 Lake Mweru is a Mission Station. In its specialised form 
 this " Mission Station " is a portmanteau-word with all 
 sorts of implications. Better : it is a small (so they caU 
 it) City of Eefuge (Chinyemeno) because the Government 
 having only a 5 per cent, patrol of their vast territory 
 this means that at any moment some old woman or man 
 can be done to death. Done to certain and cruel death 
 unless they rush over the hills and up the palm avenue to 
 our ever-open door. To fail of arrival a few, even a very 
 few, miles out would doom her. Take this grim old instance 
 of the manslayer. Blood is blood and this time it is blood 
 of man not beast. A lad lies at my feet on the path 
 stabbed mortally in two places with spear and axe wounds. 
 Ten minutes farther back we crossed the tracks of the 
 elephants that brought it all about. The wounded man's 
 brother had joined his fellow in giving chase to the herd, 
 had overtaken and in easy error shot his friend dead 
 instead of the haystack, the elephant. The Mission as City 
 of Refuge was too far ofE and the avenger's weapons had 
 already drunk blood : " Oh, Bwana ! " wailed the mori- 
 bund, " I am dying because I did not meet you sooner ; 
 even although the Mission as Refuge was too far, yet a man 
 shall be for a refuge, and you were my man, you would have 
 saved me had you come in time." Had you come in time ! 
 A perfect picture this of the change from the dispensation 
 of Law to that of Grace : as pungent as perfect, for did not 
 the former demand that the man run to the refuge, whereas 
 in Grace the Refuge runs to the man ? 
 
 I was weary at the moment, but what put new life into 
 me was the picture of God and the Prodigal in Luke xv : 
 you can verify it at your leisure, but it is probably the only 
 
THE GREAT LAKE AT LAST 65 
 
 time God is shown to be in. a hurry, " the father ran to 
 meet him ! " Thus (to point the platitude) this dying 
 man's inability to run in to us for refuge only half symbol- 
 ises the wholly dead souls unable to come to a Mission that 
 is able to go to them. All this I poured into his dying ear 
 as Gilead's balm : that Christ had come to him here and 
 now by the wayside, that some died of bullets and some of 
 old age, but that the body was but a phase and we were all 
 boimd for the Eternity where many of the great would be 
 small and the small great. So died in the forest my life- 
 for-a-life friend, died because I reached him too late, died 
 with the name of Christ his Saviour on his lips. 
 
 North, still north, we go, then a curious thing appears 
 at Kilwa, rude reminder that you have only got to go far 
 enough east to reach west. For here we enter the War 
 Zone, yes, here are four sinister stakes stuck in the ground. 
 Stuck in the ground, stiff upstanding stakes, to warn all 
 travellers with a stab of satire that one inch beyond that 
 barrier means Martial Law, which means No Law. What a 
 reminder that this imcanny war is an all-the-world affair 
 or nothing : even now, out east, the fighting is going on, 
 blood for blood, stab for stab. Thus the geography of this 
 wild wrangle is also its philosophy ; I mean, if you go too 
 far east you reach west and " the shrinkage of the planet " 
 is proved in that the very war I was leaving far to the south 
 I now find far in the Interior. 
 
 As gracious as you please, you can hear these natives 
 talk politics for hours, but it is all blunt and decisive. 
 Take their idea of the war ; it is cut and dry owing to the 
 fact that long ago, hundreds of years ago, many tribes in 
 Central Africa have fastened on the verb " to begin " as 
 their equivalent for " to sin " (vala). Thus, their idea is 
 that all the sinning Ues in the beginning, for the subsequent 
 down-smashing of any far-rolling stone must point back to 
 (and be punished on the back of !) that one who began this 
 bad business of starting the stone on its roll, ruthless, 
 ruining roll. To call Adam the beginner of it all is 
 merely to make " beginner " rhyme with " sinner," and 
 whether it be two nobodies fighting it out with fisticuffs, 
 or twelve or twenty European nations warring d I'outrance, 
 5 
 
66 THE GREAT LAKE AT LAST 
 
 all the African asks, calmly and crusliingly, is, Who was 
 the beginner, for he, oh, he is the sinner ? 
 
 This explains why they pounce on Christ's words as their 
 linguistic justification, for said He not that " offences 
 must come " (shot-and-shell-and-starvation offences must 
 come), " but woe unto that man " — who sets the brutal 
 ball a-rolliag ? Gas will beget gas ; liquid fire will be 
 answered by liquid fire ; reprisal will result in reprisal ; but 
 above all the wintry winds of Africa there moans out the 
 wild woe unto the man who began the bad business. In 
 other words, the mere fact that you come round a corner 
 and find two in deadly grips proves nothing at all. The 
 streaming blood may for the moment make you lose 
 perspective, but the clinching factor in the fight is the finding 
 out who began the brutal business : how do you know 
 but that No. 1 most wantonly attacked No. 2 ? The mere 
 amount of blood proves nothing, for who knows if No. 1 was 
 not lurking for him like a leopard, got him unawares, 
 therefore got more blood and almost got your approbation 
 but for the decisive question, Who was the beginner, for 
 he, oh, he is the sinner ? 
 
 They are a breezy lot along the Lake, their breezes 
 being both meteorological and verbal. One prisoner was 
 being tied to a log of wood with the shrugging explanation, 
 " Yes, these thiags must be, for a jackal is only docile in 
 a trap." Then the African moving-picture reel unfolds 
 and the chief turns on his heir-apparent with a roar of 
 punitive phrases. But " threatenitigs are not thrashings," 
 says their proverb, and the storm is superseded with the 
 smiling remark, " A young lion does not fear its father's 
 roar." It was the old trouble of a junior trying to ape 
 his senior, hence the father's jibe at his son, " Look out 
 now : a young chicken should eat things appropriate to 
 the size of its little throat." Still profuse with his pro- 
 verbialisms he raps out his paternal admonitions this time 
 along the line of forest mushrooms : " Yes," says he, 
 " there are more poisonous mushrooms than edibles, but 
 a wise child will never be poisoned, for he has only to 
 ask." 
 
 Later came the burial of an old fisherman, and of all the 
 
■I!ll': nil, I'AI.M AVKNTK 
 IJ'lAlllXi; \ ]■ TO (irl! 
 
 iMH )i;, WITH Til ]■: sTi.:i;[M<: 
 i;(ii,'A>srs (i\ liaitIjA 
 
 AS COX'I'KAST. 
 
 l^l^v CL' 
 
THE GREAT LAKE AT LAST 67 
 
 words in all the world what could have been more fitting 
 than this jiika, to bury ? Is it not the very verb for " the 
 grounding of a boat on the shore " after the long voyage ? 
 Here in a double delightful sense the old fisherman had 
 arrived in harbour, lit. had " grounded " ; jiiha, to bury, 
 also to arrive ia harbour. How they would laugh at the 
 English talking about anyone " landing in the water " 
 when there is no land to land on, only water. 
 
 Last of all, the fisher chief has a knock at you, John 
 Smith, the new-comer : this time he follows the analogy 
 of the dark unknown hull of an approaching canoe, the 
 faces of the distant passengers as yet unrecognised — ■ 
 friend or foe, stranger or fellow-tribesman, which ? Mu- 
 tanshi ku hlwa ni hwato is the loud hint that you, being a 
 mere stranger, you are only analogous to the dark distant 
 hull of the advancing canoe, what " passengers " have you 
 under your waistcoat ? Are they demons or angels ? 
 That is to say, your arrival is nominal not actual : you 
 are yet miles away, for " you " are your yet-future phase of 
 conduct hidden ahead in the tell-tale years. Did not the 
 traitor Arabs so come long ago, but the ultimate Arab was 
 very unlike the early Arab, all smiles and subtilty. Great 
 maritime metaphor of the miad of man, " We fisher folk 
 first see the far-ofi boat, then only much more remotely 
 do we see the passengers aboard." This, they carry right 
 into all modern innovations (vipya) and have a smack at 
 the Science that was suspect long ago. " Yes," say they, 
 " our forefathers used to say pa pela dikumhi (where the sky 
 ends), but now we know the sky is circular and never ends ! 
 And the innovations of civilisation likewise are as endless 
 and never cease." 
 
 But to resume our journey. At this point I went 
 beautifully to pieces and got my first dose of fever, Africa, 
 my jealous first love, refusing to smile on me after such a 
 desertion of her beauty. Temperature shoots up, nasty 
 taste in mouth, tongue as rough as a nutmeg grater. Then 
 the legs begin to wobble and cannot be trusted for trans- 
 portation, so this decides me to get into a native canoe, a 
 one-logger, and make a dash for home two days ahead of 
 my men. The dugout darts into the great lake at a point 
 
68 THE GREAT LAKE AT LAST 
 
 where three hippos had the bay to themselves. Far along 
 the west shore we see the bluffs of the Bukongolo Range 
 buttressing the coast. What a day : will it never end ? 
 Away in the distance, detached against the sky with start- 
 ling definition is a gaunt spike of headland, Luanza, my 
 African home. For hours and hours we paddle on, never 
 such an endless day, never such a longed-for goal. What if 
 we never get there ? What if a hippo charges our log of 
 wood and shivers it to atoms ? (Oh yes, Africa has got 
 its submarines as well as the ocean !) Now one realises how 
 
 " He doubly dies who dies 
 Within sight of shore." 
 
 But forgive and forget these fever phantoms, for here 
 we come at last neariag the cliff and night is falling. The 
 evening smoke of supper fires begins to curl, the lights 
 blinking and winking high up along The Range. They are 
 in for a surprise. My avant-couriers are late so they think 
 we are far behind, and will only arrive two days hence. 
 Then my rifle goes bang ! into the cliff and again bang ! to 
 signal our approach. Up into the gorge goes the echo with 
 a great awakening clang. After a tense two or three 
 moments of dawning silence, down comes the yell — wild, 
 welcoming yell from the hills. Now for the point when the 
 curtain must be drawn. It is all too sacred to tell. 
 Besides, who will dredge the dictionary for adequate ad- 
 jectives ? Sufficient if all that follows in quick delirious 
 succession is marked on my mind with vivid distinctiveness, 
 a memory for life. Down they rush, a black mob of natives, 
 and out I jump on the sandy shore, all the innocent joy-bells 
 of my heart ringing. Then comes a meeting with the 
 glorious missionaries who have held the fort when I was 
 away. Here they are hand grasping hand, all of us in a 
 dream, eyes dancing with delight and glad we ever lived 
 for such a moment. 
 
LI'AXZA: ■■'I'liK (ITV i ) I ' KK I'l'I.WC 
 
 OH] 
 
CHAPTER V 
 LIVINGSTONE'S "LONG LAST MILE 
 
 This chaffer anticifates and follows 
 up to his final phase the man who was 
 doubly named " The Path-borer " and 
 " The Dew-drier." The former be- 
 cause of the latter. To bore through 
 the wet morning grass is to dry of the 
 dew on to your own person. 
 
" Some to endure and many to fail. 
 Some to conquer and many to quail. 
 Toiling over the Wilderness trail." 
 
 " I will open up a path into the Interior of Africa or perish." 
 
 Livingstone. 
 "7 shall not swerve a hair shreadth from my work while life is 
 spared." 
 
 Idem. 
 " My great object was to be like Him, to imitate Him as far as He 
 could be imitated," 
 
 Idem. 
 " Nothing earthly will make me give up my work nor despair ; 
 I encourage myself in the Lord my God and go forward." 
 
 Idem. 
 
CHAPTER V 
 LIVINGSTONE'S "LONG LAST MILE" 
 
 " Carry me over the long last mile, 
 Man of Nazareth, Christ for me." 
 
 THIS chapter opens with a rather propitious event 
 as subsidiary conspirator. I am just back from 
 the eastern shore of our great Lake, where no doubt 
 the memory of many a broken resolution grinned at me 
 with a leer. Yet there are better things to tell. The 
 Central African says, " For a running deer a running shot," 
 and as we live in fidgety times I shall probably best begin 
 with the Who ? the Where ? and the Why ? of it all. Dr. 
 Livingstone's famous old L.M.S. is its Who ?, a society lying 
 half-way between our Lake Mweru here and far-away 
 Dr. Laws on Lake Nyasa. Formerly only operating around 
 Lake Tanganyika this L.M.S. (sort of shorthand for " Lon- 
 don Missionary Society ") twenty years ago put me under 
 strong obligations to it by responding to my pioneer call 
 from the Far Interior to advance into the Luapula Valley 
 and occupy the country around Kazembe's, consecrated 
 by Livingstone's own footsteps. 
 
 So said, so done (and done splendidly !), for there they 
 have held on nobly since 1900 with nearly 40 out-schools 
 and 5,000 adherents. And now comes the crown of it 
 all : Messrs. Nutter and Turner, who love every stick 
 and stone in the place, resolved to wipe away the reproach 
 of their old tumble-down barn of a meeting-place and, at 
 last, have built a stately cathedral, Central Africa's " one 
 and only." No mere empty echoing building, but crammed 
 with many hundreds of natives. The years were passing 
 with objectionable rapidity and they (with an almost 
 unnecessary and exaggerated caution) refrained from 
 abandoning the old " salvation shed " until the said shed 
 
 71 
 
72 LIVINGSTONE'S "LONG LAST MILE" 
 
 impudently proposed to abandon them. 'Tis an old sneer 
 that the threatening structure warned all entrants, " If 
 you do not get out, I will crash down and chase you out." 
 The great day drew near for the ofl&cial opening and I 
 was requested to come from far away and do the deed of 
 consecration. Europeans drew in from the scattered 
 suburbs, the Government official was there, even High 
 Anglicans came, and I opened the great Gothic door with 
 a large ivory key carved from an elephant's tusk killed in 
 the marshes around the Mofwe Lagoon. But when the 
 great Kazembe (a stagey personality) arrived with his 
 retinue, then it was the curtain of memory lifted and I 
 thought of Livingstone in glory looking down at this 
 cheering consummation of his path-finding long ago. And 
 despite all those depths and distances of negro character 
 yawning between, I poured out on that crowd the living 
 Word for which the old Doctor died. Told them of his 
 last recorded messages ; of his " imprisoning words on 
 paper " before he died ; of how he rang out his last call in 
 his last year : " My Jesus, my King, my Life, my All, 
 I again consecrate my life to Thee ! " White of hair and 
 black of heart, these old men who knew " Ingeresa " were 
 a sad-looking crowd of " burnt-out " individuals : what 
 does that deep but rather tardy concern on their corrugated 
 faces mean ? Does it hint their own proverb that " you 
 cannot get a fire from a heap of ashes " ? Or why not 
 prefer the point of view of Livingstone's favourite couplet : 
 
 " As long's the lamp holds out to burn 
 The greatest sinner may return." 
 
 This is the point where the present chronicle hopelessly 
 and irretrievably goes ofE at a tangent. This Kazembe, 
 this L.M.S. and tMs Livingstone's last trail all recall the 
 dear old hand-to-mouth heart-to-heart days when my wife 
 and I came down here from the north, the very fiist to 
 follow up Livingstone to his grave — grave of his heart, 
 rather. This great ivory key they give me, local ivory in 
 a casket of local mahogany, tells of long-gone days when we 
 opened up the country which now sees this sequence of the 
 opening of his great Church. Through the mists of memory 
 
LIVINGSTONE'S "LONG LAST MILE" 73 
 
 I can see ourselves following up the Luapula due south. 
 Escaping death, a dozen times, at last we near the historic 
 tree under which his heart lies buried. Faint but pur- 
 suing we land on the edge of Ilala country, barest, weirdest 
 of terrestrial spots. Down goes the sun like a ball of 
 fire over dark Lamba country, and as if to climax weird- 
 ness, the bush fixes sweeping through the long grass have 
 covered the land with a dark pall, Livingstone's, of 
 course, seeing the country is 113,1a. 
 
 Yonder is the Lulimala Eiver visible on the far left, 
 flowing through marsh, a flash of blue appearing now and 
 then. Looks more Uke lake than river, and lake it cer- 
 tainly was in the old days, probably an arm of Bangweulu. 
 Through the gloomy plains we go, Lulimala coming along- 
 side latterly ; and soon we strike the Luwe, where the 
 doctor, right weary of that endless splash and hard fare 
 he endured, rested from his labours. But the tree is not 
 reached yet ; on the other side of the Luwe we move along 
 floundering through the woods, tall grass and marsh ; path 
 there is none. They camped on that memorable day round 
 the Mupundu tree, an old fire-stone (genuine find this !), 
 used to steady the doctor's pots, being sole survivor. 
 And they must have looked out on the sluggish Luwe, 
 scarcely a stream, as the only hint of water is the deeper 
 dye of green down its centre. There you draw water, the 
 colour of bad tea. There, too, at sundown the reed-buck 
 comes down to drink. And, as darkness comes on, the 
 sounds of Africa's night are heard sobbing out the old 
 saying, " The night cometh when no man can work." 
 Significant, indeed, that we found The Heart lying under 
 a fruit tree, but instead of moralising let us hope that fruit 
 of another kind may abound. Old Chitambo, Ingeresa's 
 friend and " Man Friday " of those last days, lies most 
 appropriately on the ofi-side of the tree, so in death they 
 are not divided. Livingstone wanted nothing more truly 
 emblematic of his life than this. If it be true that a 
 black man carried our Lord's cross a bit of the hard 
 way to Golgotha, then here is an inverse instance of a black 
 man helping to carry the Master's servant's cross. 
 
 Immensely inspiring was it to see the camp-fires flare 
 
74 LIVINGSTONE'S "LONG LAST MILE" 
 
 up round the " Livingstone " tree. This " Mupundu " 
 shoots up a stately column, and every gleam from the 
 faggots lightened up Jacob Wainwright's deeply cut tablet, 
 Livingstone's truest memorial by a negro friend. Scenting 
 a function the Ilala folks have drawn out from their hamlets 
 for miles around. And here we are crowding the forest, 
 himself, The Chitambo, Ghief-Chairman of our memorial 
 service. The first service ever held on the sacred spot ; 
 ours the first prayers to ascend since the dying hero yielded 
 up his soul in supplication at Ilala. England, far away, did 
 it "on the grand " when it swung back the Abbey doors 
 to let him in, the weary wanderer's grave watered by a 
 nation's tears. But there was no Chitambo there. No 
 Ilala folks there who had wept him dead. No stately 
 Mupundu tree with its genuine carved memorial in Africa 
 by an African. " Talking trees," the native calls any such 
 with a cut-out name on it. Talking, indeed, this one, 
 and how eloquently. 
 
 Here in this leafy sanctuary in the Ilala woods we have 
 the true shrine. Here we see far-off Westminster dwindling 
 to its true cockney dimensions. The flicker of the camp 
 fires light up fitfully the carved letters of his name on the 
 tree, this Chitambo engraving recalling that other " D. L." 
 far away in Bothwell woods. This Livingstone when a 
 roaming lad, yes, he, too, practised this art, d la Jacob 
 Wainwright, name-carving on Scotland's trees. Out near 
 the old Roman bridge at Bothwell he, too, dug deep with 
 his knife into a tree the polemic, " NO STATE CHUECH, 
 D.L." The which is a parable, pawky parable too. Eor 
 flicker ! flicker ! go these African faggots, and flicker ! 
 flicker ! likewise goes the see-saw of memory between 
 Scottish Bothwell and African Chitambo, two different 
 trees, two different wood-cuts playing at hide-and-seek 
 in the brain. For see what it all means. These wide-awake 
 trees that " talk " are also seemingly trees that listen with 
 cocked ears. And with the lapse of years these carved 
 letters have most obligingly doubled their dimension, the 
 expanding girth of the tree expanding the memorial. 
 Sure outward and visible symbol of what the widening 
 years have done with Livingstone's fame, growing with his 
 
LIVINGSTONE'S "LONG LAST MILE" 75 
 
 growing greatness, widening with the expanse of years. 
 " No State Church ! " that one " talking tree " says to this 
 other far-away one, the jealous forest accusing stone-and- 
 mortar Westminster of robbery. 
 
 And so we reach that shaggy bit of untamed earth called 
 Ilala (short a, please) where, as the natives put it, wa 
 laala nolo, " death and he lay down together." The 
 lotus {Nympkoea lotus) is everywhere, but the lotus in 
 such marshy, murderous surroundings that it has exactly 
 the opposite effect suggested by grandpa Herodotus. I 
 say, instead of this water-lily possessing the property of 
 making strangers forget their native land, the more the 
 millions of mosquitoes hum, the more the lotus makes 
 you pine to get away. Your real longing is : 
 
 " Oh to be in England 
 Now that April's there." 
 
 Yet the same sun that softens wax hardens clay, and this 
 the negro proves, looking out on the mess. He loves the 
 very look of this lotus marsh. And just when you have 
 smiled indulgently at the Herodotus notion of this water- 
 lily having the power to make you forget your homeland, 
 just then one of my men gushed out a phrase utterly 
 endorsive of the old Greek's idea : Kuno muntu a ha 
 lavukila Tcwavo-keko huya (" Why, this is so lovely that 
 a man could forget even his fatherland ! "). Another sure 
 Biblical link this, for here is the very lotus that adorned 
 the capital of Solomon's Temple pillars, emblem of purity, 
 yea, purity won out of odoriferous mud. But does this 
 exhaust the lotus-type ? Why not rather read into it the 
 old Lotofhagi legend that it was a type of the weaning of 
 the soul from its natural home to the new and heavenly 
 one ? 
 
 But best type of all is found in good Livingstone finishing 
 his course in a land of lotus, finishing it, I mean, on his 
 knees in prayer. Does not the record read, " Upon the 
 top of the pillars was lotus-lily work : so was the work of 
 the pillars -finished " ? And did not Livingstone crown it 
 all with the lovely lily work of his dying prayer ? Lotus 
 in the land, lotus in his soul : " upon the top [the end] . . . 
 was lotus-lily work : so was the work finished." 
 
76 LIVINGSTONE'S "LONG LAST MILE" 
 
 " Father ! help me to finish this work to Thine honour " 
 was his opening prayer in the Diary for 1871. The frayer 
 to finish to God's honour was answered in this man of God 
 fraying at the finish unto God's honour. 
 
 I sought out the very spot, kneeled where he kneeled, 
 prayed the very prayer he prayed, and never did a line of 
 Shakespeare weave more subtly into one's mood, " Nothing 
 in his life became him like the leaving of it." One would 
 have thought that by sheer impact of character Sir Harry 
 Johnston's hand would have refrained from the verbal 
 vandalising of this, Livingstone's supreme farewell act 
 in life. " Last words are lasting words " — are not last 
 acts equally lasting ? Yet look at the perversity of popu- 
 larity that doomed Livingstone's life to be written for 
 " The World's Great Explorers " series ' by the very man 
 who attacked the two great gate-ways of his life, I mean, 
 entrance and exit gateways, his conversion and dying 
 prayer. When Sir Harry as early as page 59 pooh-poohed 
 Livingstone's conversion as " no change at all but simply a 
 faint simulation of the religious hysteria aroimd him," 
 one could almost anticipate what was coming in page 356 
 when he sniffs superciliously at the idea of a dying prayer. 
 
 When Punch punned his historic pun he little guessed 
 what a double-barrelled thing he made of it : 
 
 " He needs no epitaph to guard a name, 
 
 Which men shall prize while worthy work is known ; 
 He lived and died for good — he that his fame. 
 Let marble crumble: this is LIVINO-STONE." 
 
 For Livingstone's African tombstone was no mere 
 crumbling marble but a stately tree, a literal living-" stone." 
 South past Kazembe's, past Bangweulu it grew nobly until 
 some years ago the Government vandalised the spot and 
 slew the giant tree. Killed the old brave's loyal living- 
 stone that had so sentiently kept abreast of the years, 
 growing with his growing fame. The cocked-eared tablet 
 expanding with his expanding fame. Certes, here you have 
 both laugh and " counter-laugh," to use the clever African 
 
 ^ This seems too savage. His is a great book, remember, and in almost 
 all other respects most admirable. Besides, many a good word he has said 
 for aU the ideals Livingstone lived and died for. 
 
'■4 
 r p 
 
 5 w 
 
LIVINGSTONE'S " LONG LAST MILE " 77 
 
 noun : Punch has Lad his little one about a " living- 
 stone," now let this Memorial Tree retort on the limitations 
 of mere dead tablets in brass, marble, concrete or granite. 
 For six feet square is irrevocably six feet square in dead 
 memorial stone of any sort : it may crumble smaller but 
 never grow larger like this liviQg pillar of Mupundu. Not 
 so, I repeat, this living-" stone " of the alert ears that keeps 
 pace with his increasing volume of fame. More than dead 
 stone can do. This was no weakling I assure you ; the 
 stately vitality of its genus along the brow of the plateau 
 makes one regret the ofi&cial B.S.A. Co. vandalism that 
 felled the Ilala Tree. They sing a song about it, a song 
 with a true gleam of African poetry : 
 
 " Oh / Livingstone Tree ! 
 
 Oh ! Livingstone Tree ! 
 
 Wherefore dost thou jut out 
 
 So lonely and sharply on 
 
 The fire-swept moors?" 
 Answer from Tree : 
 
 " Jutting out lonely ? 
 
 Oh no ! Oh no ! 
 
 I am waiting for the King 
 
 To overtake me ! Waiting ! 
 
 Waiting for the King to come I " 
 
 True for you, St. Paul, " the whole creation groaneth 
 — waiting for . . . ! " 
 
 This vandalising of " the only tree in the forest " by 
 the Government is not the first thing of its kind down here. 
 What about the Memorial Tablet we brought in from the 
 Atlantic in 1889 ? There was a present of assorted clothes 
 for Chitambo from the Royal Geographical Society. Then 
 came the bronze plaque with Livingstone's own name and 
 date, the said Memorial to be placed solemnly at the 
 sacred spot. Alas, our kind Belgian proxies failed to reach 
 the " Mupundu." They stuck up the Tablet in the centre 
 of a village, leaving an apologetic document with the words 
 " Lost far away and in the midst of tall grass, it is only with 
 more than hesitation that the natives point out the place 
 where is interred the heart of Livingstone." Quite a 
 polite way of saying they failed to go to the goal. 
 
 We should and could have taken it ourselves. But this 
 
78 LIVINGSTONE'S "LONG LAST MILE" 
 
 passing caravan seemed opportune, so we generously gave 
 them the chance of a feather in their cap. Not, of course, 
 a white feather. Kesult : here at last we come out at the 
 " impossible " spot to find they never reached it : here is 
 The Tree they never saw, albeit they wrote reams about 
 their great deed. In that village where they so stupidly 
 stuck up the Tablet, of course, its fate is sealed. The 
 first war raid will certainly see it looted, whereas, au con- 
 traire, hanging up at the lonely spot by the grave it would 
 have been quite safe. Safe because being a dead man's 
 property it would have been inviolate from all human kind, 
 particularly the African kind. The awesome austerity sur- 
 rounding any grave in Africa would have been the Memorial 
 Tablet's true shield and buckler, but once agaiu, alas, for 
 " thinking black." Sure enough, along comes the raiding 
 Arab, Kasaki, the village chief and people retreat into the 
 marsh, and to the victors the spoils. Never dreaming of 
 a grave or graveyard memorial in a village (the abode of 
 the living !), this Arab unthinkingly began to break up the 
 brass trophy iato champion bullets. Thus all unknown to 
 him the poor peaceful Livingstone memorial roared in wrath 
 from the Arab guns for many a day, bullets instead of 
 benedictions, murder instead of mercy. 
 
 But we are not done, by no means done. The natives' 
 eyes have a tell-tale twinkle when they divulge what 
 happened soon after the Arab dared to so disappear with 
 a " dead man's belonging." What could happen, what but 
 that he died — died like a dog because he did such a dog's 
 deed 1 Error ? Oh yes, he, the Arab, did not know it 
 was a grave-yard memorial : are not Arabs as superstitious 
 as Africans ? But facts are facts, and what fact so faith- 
 ful as death and dead men ? Death pardons no errors ; 
 indeed, death trades and triumphs because of error. There- 
 fore, how could this or any Arab escape the preordained 
 doom of " a grave- vandaliser " ? All this incisive stuff, 
 remember, from these Ilala twiuklers who are really getting 
 some of their own back : was it not their village the Arab 
 looted ? 
 
 Let us therefore (with a smile-redeemed severity) ask 
 who is to blame for all this ? Certaiuly not the genial 
 
LIVINGSTONE'S "LONG LAST MILE" 79 
 
 Commandant Bia, who, after all, did his best. This good 
 Belgian, panting and lax, tottered west from the modern 
 Chitambo's to literally die in my arms at Ntenke in the 
 Lamba comitry. Nor is Arnot to blame, although he ac- 
 cepted the task of delivering this Tablet at a goal he never 
 reached in all his life. A whole conspiracy of circumstances 
 combined against him near the coast to debar his really 
 going into the Far Interior to live. Who then was to 
 blame ? Who if not myself for listening to pretensions that 
 were never intentions in this land of sun, stink and sickness. 
 They never reached the great goal and the half-doing of 
 the deed neutralised itself into its undoing. So despite 
 their many and minute explanations the Memorial Tablet 
 was lost for ever. 
 
 Livingstone's tough little Unyanyembe donkey was taken 
 by a lion near a black rib of hematite. And as we approach 
 the same spot, here comes the Chief leading ceremonially 
 a young bull to the slaughter. For had we not come a 
 long hard way to Livingstone's grave 1 Therefore, must 
 we not be welcomed with the blood of a bull, blood of beast 
 conciliating blood of man ? My reply was to quote the old 
 Mosaic words about " the blood of bulls and goats," then, 
 pointing to the twin directions of bull and sky, ask : How 
 much more did the Blood of Christ who through the 
 Eternal Spirit offered Himself without spot to God, welcome 
 Dr. Livingstone into glory after his desert wandering 
 was over 1 
 
 Poor place for donkeys down here where the marshes 
 are so deep. With canoes so coggley, lagoons so swift, this 
 is no place for the asinine race, bipeds or quadrupeds. 
 The former has to carry the latter. And even if the latter 
 " could and would " the former, what if fever or dysentery 
 debar you from sitting astride for two steps ? Livingstone 
 was wrong in disdaining the Portuguese tipioa as a means 
 of travel. He had reached the very age and stage when six 
 of his hulking Zanzibaris could have carried him through 
 a tze-tze country that debarred donkeys even. But his 
 Highland pride held out until it was too late, too late. 
 All Down-Southers have the same jibe against hammock 
 transport. The trouble is not so much the feasibilities 
 
80 LIVINGSTONE'S "LONG LAST MILE" 
 
 as the excusabilities. A grown man lying slug-a-bed in 
 tipioa, as six swarthy sweating natives carry him. across 
 marsh and forest, is a dispiriting picture for the boy-scout 
 frame of mind. 
 
 But the point is one of actual zone, not of ad captandam 
 swagger. Never did adjective so severely qualify noun, 
 for this is the Torrid Zone, not the harmless South Temper- 
 ate. To the latter you go to save your health, the former to 
 lose it. This Torrid Zone means a fictitious buoyancy 
 that lures you on to the fever that will most surely fell 
 you. And this is the whole point : Livingstone commenced 
 and continued for some years in the South Temperate 
 Zone where waggons and oxen ruled the road. But the 
 day arrived when he came north and entered the zone called 
 Torrid, new zone with new demands that ultimately 
 evolved this defence of the Portuguese hammock to miti- 
 gate vertical rays. On the Manyema exploration every 
 bone of his body was crying out for the help of this very 
 tipioa he despised. This is proved when " the living 
 skeleton " swooned into insensibility towards the end of 
 the two years, and at last he required and received the 
 hammock that would have obviated it all. Boots gone 
 to pieces ; ugly " blister " hose, " eight blisters and more 
 coming," where the darning is worse than the frank 
 old holes therein, what kind of a tramping could he make 
 of it ? ^ 
 
 No canvas was necessary in this expedient when he had 
 to be carried. The inner bark of a tree was again their 
 forest fake, same bark that in the end was improvised as 
 his travelling cofiin. This time they cut it into long narrow 
 strips of bark rope, then wove it into a wide-meshed ham- 
 mock dangling from a pole. Any African forest, any day, 
 can easily produce such an ambulance in a little over an 
 hour's work, and much better than being slung in a blanket. 
 The fact is, this tipioa arrangement can be compromised 
 rather agreeably thus : from daybreak through all the 
 opening hours you tramp with the caravan, then when 
 
 ^ Witness his own words to Sir Roderick : " I have done it all on foot, I 
 could never bear the scorn the Portuguese endure in being carried when quite 
 weU." 
 
LIVINGSTONE'S "LONG LAST MILE" 81 
 
 quite weary the hammock sees you the remaining miles 
 to camp. This leaves you fresh to go ofi with your rifle 
 and "fill the pots."' 
 
 I shall dwell on these bush expedients of Livingstone 
 later because our last glimpse of the dead is his kneeling 
 by the side of the rustic bed, body stretched forward, head 
 buried in hands on the pillow. There is the double 
 African artifice of a flickering candle stuck by its own wax 
 on the box-on-end table. The great red dawn will soon be 
 up, but, not ashamed of its lowly light, thus burnt-at-both- 
 ends candle sheds its last rays on the dead man it so surely 
 symbolises. Stuck by its own wax to the box, the candle 
 is its own candlestick, the box its own table, even as the 
 dying doctor must be his own doctor. 
 
 The last stone in a pyramid is a whole pyramid. No tent 
 to sleep in ? Then he waits in the drizzling rain while 
 his last grass hut is made. No bedstead 1 Then cut 
 your saplings and make one. No mattress ? Then pull 
 up a great bundle of grass growiug on the spot, each stalk 
 of it longer than any bed. No matches owing to swamping 
 in the wet ? Then he gets his light from a wild fig-stick 
 twirled cleverly to ignition. (The pyramid is narrowing 
 to the top.) No more coffee ? Then he does without it. 
 No more bread ? That, too, is done without. No more 
 breath ? (Now for it, David !) Life's long last one. Long 
 last one. 
 
 So he lay dead to the sound of the natives driving off 
 the buffaloes from the corn. 
 
 So he lay dead to the wild screaming and " stridulous 
 coughing " of the early hemp smoker with the gourd 
 pipe. 
 
 So he lay dead for the land he loved because God loved 
 it. 
 
 And all about one Jesus of Nazareth who was born in a 
 cattle-stall in the year of Augustus's first enumeration — 
 but His goings forth are of old, from everlasting. 
 
 Afar the golden-crested crane is calling. 
 
 1 Of course all this is ex post facto reminiscence, for later the push-bike 
 wormed its way along the wriggly trail with great success. Dr. Pearson, I 
 think, was the very first to come across the Luapula with one on to the Plateau. 
 
 6 
 
CHAPTER VI 
 WHY HE DID IT 
 
 Knowing the world, to have a curiously 
 hard-headed mode of judging a thing by 
 'practical results, old man Livingstone 
 is ever at it, fighting for his dream 
 though it fills not his stomach. 
 
" Instead of the Government Malarial Commission settling ' the 
 fever bugs,' the same redoubtable parasites pretty nearly ' settled ' the 
 Malarial Commission." 
 
 " Sweeter than any song 
 My song that found no tongue ; 
 Nobler than any fact 
 My wish that failed of act." 
 
 " The right is the right, if the lads were the lads." 
 
 Motto of the Clans Macnab and Neish. 
 
CHAPTER VI 
 WHY HE DID IT 
 
 IT is tardly worth while to consider the old lie, amazing 
 and amusing lie, that it was the Doctor who so 
 ordered them to march to Zanzibar with his dead 
 body. We have the black-and-white of Livingstone's 
 " Journals " for it that when he lay dying ia the Far 
 Interior he (not he !) did not cast longing eyes to snug, 
 comfortable England. Did not long for a national funeral 
 in the Abbey. Did not want them to open the Abbey 
 doors and let him iu to sleep with king and sage. We have 
 the cold ink of the great Diary for it that he longed — and 
 keenly ! — to sleep in the Africa he had loved and lived 
 in. Read it : 
 
 " Jime 25, 1868. — We came to a grave in the forest . . . 
 a little path showed that it had visitors. This is the sort 
 of grave I should prefer : to lie in the still, still forest, and 
 no hand ever disturb my bones. The graves at home always 
 seemed to me to be miserable especially those in the cold 
 damp clay, and without elbow room ; but I have nothing 
 to do but wait till He who is over all decides where I shall 
 have to lay me down and die." 
 
 So wrote Livingstone when he " gave commandment 
 concerning his bones." The Abbey got him, but against 
 the dear desires of his heart. " Many," wrote he, " have 
 thought that I was inflated by the praise I had lavished 
 upon me, but I made it a rule never to read anything of 
 praise." How symbolic all this burial of his heart in 
 Africa and his body in England ! The heart that hankered 
 after an African grave got the African burial it longed 
 for under this famous Mupundu tree. 
 
 It comes to this. The heart and body that had fought 
 each other a Voutrance for sixty years ended this business 
 
 85 
 
86 WHY HE DID IT 
 
 of separation by being separated at last. Heart buried 
 in Africa, body buried across the seas make an abnost 
 painfully convincing picture of the seesaw of duty and 
 desire. Again Shakespeare, his old favourite, comes to 
 the rescue : Nothing in his life became him so much as his 
 mode of leaving it. 
 
 And Livingstone spoke what he wrote. One day passing 
 through the forest of Ukamba with Stanley they stumbled 
 on a bleaching skull, the price paid for privations of travel 
 by the man who once owned it. Then it was Livingstone 
 began the old business of his " death desire," telling his 
 companion how he never saw an African forest with its 
 solemn stillness and serenity without wishing to be buried 
 quietly under the dead leaves,where he would be sure to rest 
 undisturbed. In England there was no elbow room, the 
 graves often desecrated, and ever since he had buried 
 his wife in the woods of Shupanga he had sighed for just 
 such a spot, where his weary bones would receive the eternal 
 rest they coveted. 
 
 It is admissible to remember that this ex-missionary 
 Livingstone is a living-and-dying lesson to all past-tense 
 preachers. The days of his " contract liability " to preach 
 are over : but for Livingstone there is "no discharge in 
 that war." Had he not given his word, once for all, to 
 his own soul and to his God ? 
 
 " Better to enter maimed or halt or blind 
 Into the Life of Life than be 
 An exile from its courts eternally : 
 If I should gain the whole world and find myself undone 
 With every good gift for my own — save one. 
 What utmost world-wide gain could succour me f 
 Better- to enter, maimed or halt or blind," 
 
 " You know," wrote General Gordon to Sir Eichard 
 Burton, " you know the hopelessness of such a task as 
 African Missions till you find a St. Paul or a St. John. 
 Their representatives nowadays want so much per year 
 and a contract." Here comes the test : will this free-lance 
 Livingstone forget the vows of his youth, forget the God 
 " who had only one Son and He made Him a Foreign 
 Missionary " ? Time will tell, you say. " No," says 
 Liviagstone, " Eternity will tell." 
 
WHY HE DID IT 87 
 
 Past-tense Missionaries ? Is it a Stokes hanged in the 
 African forest, or a Fenwick hunted for days in the marshes 
 until finally killed for his crime 1 Take the latter case, for 
 there is a Livingstone link in it, the Livingstone who to- 
 wards the end had arrived at the serene cast of countenance 
 of a man to whom nothing more could happen. Be it noted 
 this ex-Missionary called Livingstone had an old ex- 
 load carrier called Chipatula. This ex-carrier ceased to 
 follow his old master in more senses than one. Then he 
 meets another ex-Missionary called Fenwick who also 
 ceases to follow his former faith. Now see the sort of 
 combination you have in this ex-everything alliance. 
 These two, black and white, spurned the Livingstone initia- 
 tive, made a kind of shepherd tartan partnership, ex- 
 Missionary and ex-Missionary's servant. Soon they have 
 gone the way of the tropics in headstrong high-handed 
 action, hands stained with blood, both of them. Then one 
 day they fall foul of each other in the dividing of the spoils ; 
 a drunken wrangle, the crack of a revolver and he is dead, 
 the ex-Missionary killing the ex-carrier of Livingstone. 
 Then follows the inevitable end, blood for blood, white for 
 black, and the ex-Missionary dies in the marsh, head cut 
 ofi. Africa! 
 
 I agree with Conan Doyle in this matter. The running 
 of a tropical colony is, of all tests, the most searching as 
 to the development of the nation that attempts it ; to 
 see helpless people and not to oppress them, to see great 
 wealth and not to confiscate it, to have the absolute power 
 and not to abuse it, to raise the native instead of sinking 
 yourself, these are the supreme trials of a nation's spirit. 
 It is the old story : solar heat and soul heat have no a£&nity . 
 The longer Peter warmed himself at the world's fire the 
 colder he got. The African Missionary can get colder as 
 he gets older. There is a chmatic conspiracy to this effect ; 
 European provisions go bad, Europeans dogs go bad, 
 European Missionaries go bad. " The animalistic, self- 
 indulgent white man approximates yet nearer the animal ; 
 the intellectually active, destitute of the stimulus of con- 
 versation and encounter with diverse opinion and nimble 
 wits, becomes an intellectual fungoid." 
 
88 WHY HE DID IT 
 
 Althougli there was no clink of gold in it for Livingstone, 
 off he went alone along the African trail, one really white 
 man among his millions of blacks. This one-at-a-time 
 path-boring business very soon robs a man of any little 
 ability he ever had to do " team work " with another. The 
 very configuration of the one-by-one trail lays down the 
 law that no two can go abreast, one must precede, the 
 others follow. This explains how Livingstone " the path- 
 borer " was a bit of an exploring despot. Edwards, he 
 broke with him ; Bedingfield likewise ; Baines likewise ; 
 Thornton likewise ; all four broken with because of this 
 simple old certainty that while in Africa " where there is 
 a will there is a way," yet where there are several wills 
 there is no way. 
 
 This is why in the end he set out alone : he simply 
 "couldn't" be a second. How could he expect another 
 man to tackle native mush and beans ; or often the latter 
 without the former ; and sometimes neither former nor 
 latter ? In the old grooves of the old lands men work 
 together unquestioningly because there is nothing to 
 question in time-honoured precedents. Here in his pion- 
 eering, where every unknown mile ahead was conjecture, 
 two travellers could never conceivably agree on the when, 
 where and how of the venture. 
 
 Whom God appoints He anoints, and Livingstone's lone 
 furrow was the exigency of exploration, not its egotism. 
 Better than any of us did he know that when a man, any 
 man, is wrapped up in himself he makes a pretty small 
 parcel. " I think," said he, " one may be quite safe 
 if alone and without anything to excite the cupidity of 
 the natives. It might be six or seven years before I should 
 return, but if languages are dialects of the Bechuana, 
 I could soon make known a little of the blessed plan of 
 mercy to the different tribes on the way ; and if I should 
 never return, perhaps my life will be as profitably spent as 
 a forerxmner as in any other way. I thank God I have no 
 desire to accumulate money. Whatever way my life can 
 be best spent to promote the glory of our gracious God, 
 I feel desirous to do it." 
 
 The reason for all his weary tramping can be traced 
 
WHY HE DID IT 89 
 
 back to the old L.M.S, Kolobeng days : there lie was out 
 on the edge of the unknown. And to go too near the 
 edge means that you may fall over. Mais oui, and fall 
 over Livingstone did ; over to Ngami, over to the Maka- 
 lalo, over to Loanda and all the weary rest. By " the 
 edge," I mean that this outpost Kolobeng was the ultima 
 thule of those early days in Missions. But even up to 
 there, and beyond there, came the Gordon Cummings, the 
 Oswells, and the Webbs, big men out for big game. So here 
 came the challenge in the smoke of thousands of untouched 
 villages far away to the north. Why should the hunter 
 be first along the virgin trail ? Was it not written that 
 " in all things Jesus Christ must have the pre-eminence " ? 
 
 And long prior to Burton and Speke, had not two Mis- 
 sionaries E^rapf and Eebman (1844) told of Victoria Nyanza, 
 and the Nile flowing north 1 Why not continue their 
 tradition — missionary tradition ? They were Germans, 
 but was it not the German Gutzlafi who had roused Living- , 
 stone in his yoimg manhood to resolve on a vocation, not ''. 
 a career, to go out for God, not for self 1 And (such is the i 
 stab of the story) in cruel contrast to the British official 
 at Zanzibar, was it not the kind German Consul who forced 
 Stanley to write that he " could not have shown warmer 
 feelings if Dr. Livingstone had been a near and dear 
 relation of his own " 1 Personally, I can never forget what 
 Germans did for me on my first crossing of Africa from the 
 west coast to the east. Leaving the Tanganyika plateau 
 we cut due east towards unknown Rimgwe, and then our 
 avant-courier went on as a feeler carrying from me, Mr. 
 Vague, to them, Messrs. Equally Vague, my " To all whom 
 it may concern " notification of approach. Who will he 
 meet in the unknown, friend or foe, Arab or European, we 
 from the far West and they from the far East ? 
 
 At long last, after some days' delay, I heard the bang of 
 a gun ahead. And nothing more tangible than intuition 
 told me that this, oh, this was our courier back with news 
 of some sort. He it was who emerged from the grass. A 
 page of white paper in his hand. No envelope. No date. 
 No signature. No address. Only four lines written in red. 
 Written in German, not English. Written in God's words, 
 
90 WHY HE DID IT 
 
 not man's : " Be careful to entertain strangers, for some 
 have thereby entertained angels unawares." 
 
 Who are they, I wonder ? As this is a piece of curiosity 
 that the reader may share,perhaps it hadbetter be explained 
 that these Moravians are here in the old Kraft-Eebman 
 succession. And for a Moravian to merely welcome a co- 
 national would be only German meeting German. Whereas 
 to " entertain strangers " means a chance for an angel- 
 foreigner now and then. Hence this red ink effusion 
 branded on my brain as a rubric for evermore. So red, so 
 reminiscent of the blood of the Lamb " slain before the 
 foundation of the world." Therefore, slain " before," 
 long before, petty nations began their international nagging. 
 Therefore, pleading priority over lesser because later 
 improvisations born of Babel. 
 
 All of which recalls what Grey, with tear-filled eyes, said 
 to Page on the black night of August 4. Let us have it in 
 the American Ambassador's own words : " War had just 
 been declared. * We must remember that there are two 
 Germanys,' said Sir Edward. ' There is the Germany of 
 men like ourselves — of men like Lichnowsky and Jagow. 
 Then there is the Germany of men of the war party. The 
 war party has got the upper hand.' At this point Sir 
 Edward's eyes filled with tears. ' Thus the efforts of a 
 lifetime go for nothing. I feel like a man who has wasted 
 his life.' " 
 
 The fact of my wife's being so far on into the Interior is 
 the great idea that seems to have fastened on the imagina- 
 tion of these out-East natives — actually calling that slice 
 of the map after her name. The thrill of this thing came 
 out farther along when at sundown I stumbled into an 
 Arab camp. Emerging from the long grass, I made for a 
 fire in the centre of their huts, then squatted down beside 
 some old men with white skull-caps. Swahili was the 
 lingua franca and they were amazed at my direction, that 
 is to say, out from the interior heading for the Ocean, 
 not the vice versa of " tenderfoots." Then they quizzed 
 me how far " in " I had come from. The Tanganyika 
 Plateau ? No, farther in than that. Itawa ? Farther in 
 still. Bemba land ? Farther west still ? Chienji ? Not 
 
WHY HE DID IT 91 
 
 even there. Then it was a sapient old son of Tippo Tib 
 scored a bull's eye : " You cannot possibly have come 
 from so far as the ' Mrs. Crawford country ' ? " {inchi 
 ya Bibi Kongo). I complimented him grimly on his geo- 
 graphical acumen and notified that I was the Bwana of 
 the said Bibi. 
 
 In pioneer days it is amusing to see how mere place 
 is swamped by personality. We don't say that moving in 
 from the Ocean you first find Lake Nyasa, then later Lake 
 Tanganyika, then onward and inward to Lake Mweru. 
 No, with backs to the Indian Ocean we speak of persons 
 not places, of Hetherwick as first at Blantyre on the map 
 moving " in " ; then later comes Dr. Laws up in the clouds 
 at Kondowi ; north you go now to the Germans at Rungwe ; 
 then out on to the Tanganyika Plateau for the L.M.S. 
 folks ; and so west, due west, until you cross Lake Mweru 
 and reach the Never-Never land, the " Mrs. Crawford 
 country." Thus mere dead places are ignored for living 
 persons ; did not those old Lakes lie for centuries flashing 
 under the sun until a few busy folks came along and put 
 their name and fame on the map ? 
 
 To conclude this chapter. In a plaguing and persistent 
 way I feel all this may seem digression, deplorable digres- 
 sion. Yet the fact is there is more, much more, of this 
 Livingstone legend to follow. Facing me, remember, is 
 this modern Kazembe in this modern church at Mbereshi 
 crowded with modern natives : the Larmnonds are there 
 from Kaleba, Leeke and Pulley from Chilikwa and Sims 
 from Maansa, all in the Livingstone succession, all pioneer 
 Missionaries who followed where he led. The floodgates 
 of memory have opened and swept me out into the 
 subsequent chapters that make or mar this book. 
 
 These things demand a record : they are fresh data of 
 the dying Livingstone by those who know the language 
 he never knew, he a mere passer-by. Nor did Chuma and 
 Susi know Chibemba any better : this is proved from the 
 farrago they made of his death-song improvised by the 
 ballad singers at the Ilala burial. Fleet Street with all 
 its faults and follies never turned out a more elegant 
 fiction than that. Besides : nearly all the unwarped. 
 
92 WHY HE DID IT 
 
 unbiased old folks who knew the man, knew his manners, 
 are all dead. Hence this chronicle of their endorsement of 
 Livingstone as a man who lived in the faith and fear of 
 Jesus Christ. 
 So we find our work. So let us work our find. 
 
"LET THEM TAKE PUNCH'S MOTTO FOR KAZBMBE, 
 'NIGGERS DON'T REQUIRE TO BE SHOT HERE.'"— 
 LIVINOSTONE. 
 
BOOK II 
 
 CHAPTER VII 
 SOUTH TO THE GRAVE OP THE HEART 
 
 This chapter is dedicated to the first 
 lady who penetrated the Far Inte- 
 rior, where under such magnificent 
 sanctions, amid such ignoble circum- 
 stances, she led the way. 
 
THE HEART OF AFRICA 
 
 " The Government'' s official organ " The British Central Africa 
 Gazette,'' just to hand, contains a lengthy description of Mr. Hugo 
 Genthes' visit to Livingstone's grave. The tree beneath which his 
 heart was buried is still standing, and quite recently a strong fence 
 has been erected round it — nobody knows by whom. Mr. Genthe 
 was informed that a mysterious white man and a lady had come from 
 the north-west of Luapula some months ago, and caused the fence to 
 be erected. All they left to prove identity was their initial carved on 
 a neighbouring tree — 'D ' and 'G. C, 31.7.97.' Who were they?" 
 " The Evening News," April 13, 1898. 
 
CHAPTER VII 
 SOUTH TO THE GRAVE OF THE HEART 
 
 NOW the South is calling, Livingstone's South. And 
 if you would take our " D. and . G. C." bearings 
 it is vital you fasten on the fact that many a 
 blatant potentate ahead is blocking this southern trail ; 
 Kazembe, for instance, who repelled Sir Alfred Sharpe and 
 the chuckling Mirambo who plundered Giraud. Starting 
 here on Lake Mweru and darting down the east of Luapula 
 as far as the Zambezi, there is not one white skin all the way ; 
 only the Messrs. Negro in abundant aboriginal possession. 
 To make matters worse, the British at Kalungwizi have got 
 into grips with Kazembe, first blood has been shed, and 
 Kazembe is resolved to fight to a finish. Yet Livingstone 
 had warned to the contrary ; had, indeed, given a guarantee 
 of a good reception from this, " the good Kazembe." 
 Spealang of the men who were to follow in his footsteps 
 he said, " If they take Punch's motto for Kazembe, ' Niggers 
 don't require to be shot here,' as their own, they may show 
 themselves to be men ; but whether they do or not, Ka- 
 zembe will show himself a man of sterling good sense." 
 Obviously, then, someone has blundered and that one 
 not necessarily the Livingstone whose grave is watered by 
 a nation's tears. 
 
 Must all the promise and potency of Dr. Livingstone's 
 assurance be lost ? Why not cross the lines ; why not 
 penetrate into Kazembe's den and test the truth of 
 " Ingeresa's " code ? This my wife and I resolve to do and 
 here is the joint record of our venture. It makes the 
 heart warm and the eye moisten to hear how the natives 
 belaud the old man with the weary stoop ; the Livingstone 
 who abjured the silly strut of modern explorers and made 
 them feel he was of the ordinary common clay. 
 
 95 
 
96 SOUTH TO THE GRAVE 
 
 But with so much, pulsating quicksilver about, British 
 versus Blacks, it is difficult, not to say dangerous, to 
 cross the lines and slip in among primitive man who 
 never dreamed of Eed Cross rules. First blood has 
 begun to flow and never more than now does the 
 aboriginal native prefer your room to your company. 
 Why this cardinal, this reprehensible error in putting 
 your nose in a real war even although you profess to be 
 " Livingstone's brother " ? Livingstone was all right, but 
 these British who have followed him. are all wrong, and we, 
 D. and G. C, may be more so. We are like nothing in 
 the world but Mr. and Mrs. Quixote troubling with trouble 
 when trouble does not propose to trouble us. 
 
 It took us three days to plumb the bedrock of this how- 
 to-penetrate business, but at last we won, and slipped in 
 from the West among a crowd of wild beasts who had " red 
 eyes," as the warriors put it. A mad mob of Kazembeites 
 who never dreamed that kindliness and good fellowship 
 stand at the summit of the hierarchy of virtues. With 
 the British guns going bang out in the manioc fields it 
 was as easy to get killed as to wink, but the great King 
 anticipated it all by ringing round us a skerm of 60 long 
 sticks stuck in the ground, and lo ! there we were caged in 
 a sort of local Zoo with keepers patrolling the stockade 
 and chasing off the more daring. 
 
 Twice, yes, twenty times did I try to placate them, but 
 my voice from behind the bars was lost in the yelling 
 dissonance. If they would only look at you instead of 
 through you. Things grew cahner, however, after regulat- 
 ing my financial obligations with the tough old canoe men, 
 the white of our " cash-calico " being emblematic of our 
 white skins and whiter sympathies. Besides, one anchor 
 we have all the time to windward ; I mean, that emerging 
 as we do from their fabled Far Interior, their Never-Never 
 land, it gives us tremendous prestige, we turning the tables 
 and telling them for hours about their own unknown Africa. 
 
 Better : this is my second visit, the last being when I 
 cut straight east from Mushidi's capital. As straight east, 
 I mean, as the geographic conformation of the country 
 would permit. Then I was beggar in rags, limping along 
 
KAZKitllE, lOul-l'Jl'.i. 
 'hoto liy Mr. ]!. R. Tnriici 
 
 96) 
 
OF THE HEART 97 
 
 in old slippers in the rain. All along the route I found it 
 was the first time the optical nerves of the excited natives 
 had been disturbed by a white skia. A la Zaccheus they 
 cHmbed trees, climbed roof tops, climbed stockades, climbed 
 grain barns, craning their necks for a glimpse at this 
 passing curiosity with the white pigment and shaggy 
 immanageable whiskers. Eemember, all this, as I have 
 said before, is a mere ovation to my white skin, not white 
 character. And it is not at all flattering to recall the fact 
 that yonder red-haired hobbledehoy of an Englishman, 
 smokmg his short pipe at the corner of Seven Dials, would 
 get as royal a welcome. Besides, ovation notwithstanding, 
 you need not go away and fancy everybody ia the town ia 
 thinking of you : nay, verily, he is like you, he is thinking 
 of himself. 
 
 It was dies memorabilis when last I struck the banks of 
 this famous Luapula, the river Livingstone immortalised in 
 his dying words, " How many days to the Luapula ? " We 
 are not nearly dying, not we ; not nearly Like Livingstone 
 (we !), but the vertical rays are so vicious that many a time 
 we long to sight its blue waters with the same craving cry, 
 " How many days to the Luapula ? " (Note that tech- 
 nical travel-phrase in Africa, " How many days ? " not 
 " How many miles ? " Any place is tragically so many 
 "days" o£E, and a day = fifteen miles' journey.) This 
 name, Luapula, comes from the verb pula, to pierce, and 
 never shall I (or they) forget the great day, twenty years 
 ago, when against the roaring of their war drums, against 
 their tribal order forbidding the intrusive idea, we dared 
 the first ascent (well done, Greenock !) of this their sacredly 
 shut river in my Clyde-built schooner. The Messenger of 
 Peace. 
 
 It was a river to be pierced, the prejudices of the local 
 people being all against the very idea of outsiders sailing 
 up its select waters. Cicero knew all about this when he 
 insisted that the Lathi word hostis means both " a stranger " 
 and " an enemy," because all outsiders slipping in to spy 
 out the leanness of the land were thus potential enemies. 
 The poisoned arrows were there, so were the poisoned minds 
 of tribesmen, but, nothing daunted (hush ! after a prayer 
 
98 SOUTH TO THE GRAVE 
 
 meeting), we performed the historic act of truly and tech- 
 nically opening this great waterway for the outside world. 
 Livingstone kept far back to the land, we to the water, 
 but both of us made the country send back the first Euro- 
 pean echo of God's praise. Never shot was fired, never 
 poisoned arrow thrown, yet the day cuhniriated in a true 
 victory for the ways and words of peace. Thus it is when 
 we strike the banks of dear old Luapula we feel almost 
 pardonably a proprietary privilege about the place. 
 
 I got a dug-out, and down the middle we dart among the 
 beds of oysters growing like clumps of fiowers, while beyond 
 these, there go the otters dancing out of the water in pairs. 
 Schools of hippos, too, are playing where the water is dark 
 and deep, but the crocodiles, I must confess, are beginning 
 at last to break our old riverine rules ; I mean, they are 
 really out on the war-path leaping into passing canoes, 
 whereas formerly they only surreptitiously grabbed from 
 land. But all this paled into insignificance before a final 
 funny thing : at sunset, I met my best lion in the best of 
 all conceivable circumstances. I had only for the moment 
 a miserable shot-gun, and just when my enemy the sun 
 was setting in a red, revengeful manner, lo ! out stalks 
 this magnificent specimen on the bank, the most beautiful 
 lion I ever saw. There was no gleam of cordiality in his 
 eye, only the promptings of a healthy feline curiosity. 
 Though that lion did not actually shrug his shoulder, his 
 eyes, so to speak, did it for him. My boat boys stopped 
 their paddle-song in a snap, and for a moment exhibited 
 all the phenomena of funk. Then they accepted the 
 absurd situation of a boat without a rifle and a lion 
 without a carnivorous chance. Such is the perversity of 
 circumstances : the width of flowing river forbids him to 
 spring on us and the lack of one bullet in our boat debars 
 his death. 
 
 Nor did he seem to fail to catch the sporting significance 
 of the situation : he and we now know that on this excep- 
 tional occasion no blood can flow out instead of in. It 
 comes to this : with a sophisticated indifierence he flicks 
 convention to the winds with one toss of the head and we 
 settle down to enjoy, actually enjoy, this preposterous 
 
OF THE HEART 99 
 
 pit-a-pat situation. Nodding to each other a half-irritated 
 acquiescence of the armistice arrangement, in that long look 
 we certainly used our eyes up to their full optical measure 
 — lion looking at man, man at lion with a never-again wist- 
 fulness. Then it was, peering down the long telescope of 
 history, I seemed to see how he, yes, he alone has brought 
 the knack of standing on four legs with dignity to a fine 
 art. Seemed to see how all ages, all nations were justified 
 in deciding that this intensely kingly looking animal, 
 enshrining great traditions, is the Prince of quadrupeds. 
 At first, when the supreme deprivation of my rifle dawned 
 on me, I was chagrined at the loss of its yellow, leonine 
 skin, but now — by no means now. Charmed to meet him 
 in any capacity, this is a thing I will never, no never, forget 
 on earth, my long-sustained. Zoo-despising look at that 
 lion for half an hour. Zoo ? I will never care to enter 
 one again. A lion caged in London is as bad as a Mission- 
 ary parading a platform in the same city : it is like a 
 fireless chimney in summer ; like a soldier deserting the 
 fighting line and trying his rifle at a cheap shooting range. 
 When the sun disappeared, so did Felis leo. Then on I 
 sailed into the dark water, scarcely believing that only 
 yesterday, high up that very same river, I had baptized 
 sixteen natives before a great crowd, including ten local 
 chiefs, and not excluding everything that could walk, crawl 
 or be carried in arms. Into the dark north we sail on 
 water smooth as silk. 
 
 But to revert to old Kazembe. Conducted from our 
 Zoo-cage to The Presence, the Mwata arched his aristocratic 
 eyebrows when we proposed to shake hands, refused point- 
 blank, and expected us to kow-tow. Is he not so great that 
 he cannot be mentioned in the singular number, singular 
 enough though he is in other respects ? What would my 
 Quaker friends do here ? This means that the Messrs. 
 Kazembe is the plural name of the singular man, he can 
 do nothing, but "they," yes, they, the Messrs. Kazembe 
 can. Nevertheless this singular king with the plural name 
 is very gracious and returned our salute with a fine cold 
 dignity. There was an old-world politeness in his manner 
 when he turned to my wife saying, " We, the Messrs. Ka- 
 
100 SOUTH TO THE GRAVE 
 
 zembe, do come of age to-day, in that we behold the first 
 white lady who ever came from the salt seas. But know 
 ye, Oh ! Messrs. The White Lady, that you too come of 
 age to-day on gazing upon our face, we the Messrs. 
 Kazembe." 
 
 The genuine Kazembe this of Livingstone's day, here he 
 is still reigning in septuagenarian majesty. There are 
 spots on the sun, however, and the first you spy is the tell- 
 tale enamel gloss on his face ; the bondage of hemp-smok- 
 ing, this. Fifty years ago he dared his first whiff of hemp, 
 the deadliest of all the devil's drugs, and quickly was he 
 drawn into the suck of the vortex. Now, though this 
 alkaloid slay him yet must he cling to it : sold himself body 
 and soul to the hell that binds hrm in the bonds of hemp. 
 Truly this is the kind that cometh not out but by prayer 
 and fasting. It fascinates him like a basilisk. Try to 
 rouse him ; shout in his ears like a wild prophet " to fly, 
 tarry not in all the plain, escape to God's mountains " and 
 poor old K. thinks you mad. He hath chosen the evil 
 part that cannot be taken away from him. Puff, puffing 
 at this hellish hemp for fifty years has sapped any soul he 
 ever had. It first smiled, then caressed, then soothed, then 
 seduced and finally damns him. Of course, having sold 
 his soul for hemp, this old man will on emergency give 
 anything for a smoke, a common price being the bartering 
 of one of his many wives for a small packet of hemp — a 
 wife for a smoke, (They have no payments in cash, re- 
 member ; no cash, only kind, and that kind the best kind, 
 the humankind,) Nor can we laugh when we recall the 
 fact that only yesterday the great British poet who re- 
 ceived the Nobel prize wrote : 
 
 " A woman is only a woman 
 And a good cigar is a smoke," 
 
 Yet across river old Mushidi sang another song on this 
 subject of smoking. He was a tobacco-fiend in the other- 
 way-roimd sense of the phrase ; in all his territory it was 
 criminal to try it on as either snuff or smoke. This ex- 
 plains how, long after in Christianity, the African churches 
 made much, too much, of " blowing a cloud." It was a 
 
■4 .&.,%, 
 
 ■'■ f<^ 
 
 ICA/KMBK. 
 
 Dird 1911 I 
 
 IIJUJ 
 
OF THE HEART 101 
 
 mortal sin, it was " to fall," and all because smoking in 
 Africa often means much, more than it does to us. Means 
 too extreme a thing, means many women falling into the 
 fire after the one awful gurgling inhalation, the literal 
 " pufi " that is singular in more than number. Hence 
 the very noun fwa (ka) (tobacco) is only and obviously 
 an enlarged form of the imperative, " die ! " Thus 
 where we gibly talk tobacco as a mere immaterial 
 whifi these black " babes " tackle it as they do all things, 
 in a terrible manner : like their beer — in gallons ; like their 
 marriage — ^wives per dozen ; like their eating — great 
 ventral distension. Thus extremes meet, and it is the black 
 man who brads his brother black in tobacco taboo. Was it 
 not the presence of millions of Africans in America that 
 forced on Prohibition ? He can do nothing by halves, 
 his seasons are either too dry or too wet, he is a creature 
 of feast or famine, and tobacco can bum and blemish 
 hundreds of them in one year. 
 
 In Abyssinia farther north, the King issued an edict, 
 that any of his subjects found smoking shall lose hand 
 and foot. This Christian King is almost as intolerant as 
 the Wahhabees. Palgrave tells how he once asked a 
 doctor of that sect which were the great sins. " Putting on 
 a profound air, ... he uttered his oracle, that ' the first 
 of the great sins is the giving divine honours to a creature.' 
 . . . ' Of course,' I replied, ' the enormity of such a sin 
 is beyond aU doubt. But, if this be the first, there must 
 be a second ; what is it ? ' ' Drinking the shameful ' 
 (in English, ' Smoking tobacco ') was the unhesitating 
 answer. ' And murder and adultery and false witness ? ' 
 I suggested. ' God is merciful and forgiving,' rejoined 
 my friend. AU this is analogous to Africa, for ' drinking ' 
 {nwa) tobacco is their very phrase. Yet no country in 
 the world, says Lobo, is so fuU of churches, monasteries, 
 and ecclesiastics as Abyssinia. It is not possible to 
 sing in one church or monastery without being heard 
 by another, and perhaps by several. They sing the 
 Psalms of David, of which they have a very exact trans- 
 lation in their own language, . . . they begin their 
 concert by stamping their feet on the ground, and 
 
102 SOUTH TO THE GRAVE 
 
 pla3dng gently on their instruments ; but when they have 
 heated themselves by degrees, they leave ofi drumming, and 
 fall to leaping, dancing, and clapping their hands, at the 
 same time straining their voices for the pauses, and seem 
 rather a riotous, than a religious, assembly. For this 
 manner of worship they cite the psalm of David, * clap 
 your hands, all ye nations/ " 
 
 Kazembe ordered a transcendent leopard skin to be 
 placed for us to sit on, and when moving off, my servant 
 coolly rolled it up and brought it along. As, however, it 
 is not usual in our coimtry to levant with the sofa one has 
 sat on in a friend's house, I protested at his noonday 
 pilfering of royal property. The answer was unanswerable ; 
 was, indeed, that the act and fact of our sitting on the same 
 had made the skin ours for evermore. The leopard had 
 sat on and in that self-same skin, why not we ? Yea, even 
 as the leopard had worn that very skin until death did them 
 part, so now that same skin is ours as long as we have a 
 skin to cover us. 
 
 Livingstone, I find, went through this same beau monde 
 oddity, only we came out with more finesse. First his 
 trouble was how to get this highly-favoured " cat-can-look- 
 at-a-King " audience at all. " We did not," he writes, 
 " get an audience from Casembe ; the fault lay with Kapika 
 being afraid to annoy Casembe by putting him in mind of 
 it, but on the 15th Casembe sent for me. This made me 
 thank Him who has the hearts of all in His hand. He 
 asked if I had not the leopard's skin he gave me to sit on, 
 as it was bad to sit on the ground ; I told him it had so 
 many holes in it people laughed at it and made me ashamed, 
 but he did not take the hint to give me another ! " 
 
 Along with this royal skin came an old " leopard " 
 authority who in telling of their doings fell a-chuckling 
 so that his paunch shook like jelly. Both of the cat family, 
 he tells the tale of a domestic puss one day meeting a 
 leopard on the edge of the wood, the former reproaching 
 the latter with its hate for pussy's benefactor. The leo- 
 pard in a passionless, predestined manner let it all out in 
 explaining the reason of his attacking the human kind. 
 " One day," said Felis fardis, " I overheard your kind 
 
OF THE HEART 103 
 
 (forsooth !) ' humans ' discussing my dead sister's body 
 found rotting in the long grass. All they said, the callous 
 fiends, was, ' Alas ! what a beautiful skin was spoiled by 
 the white ants eating it/ " No thought (they !) of the poor 
 dead leopard's agonising death, only pique, only chagrin 
 for the ruined skm to sit on. Then the domestic cat tried 
 a few more inadequate phrases in defence of its kind friends, 
 the householders in mud huts, but the leopard snarled at 
 puss as a renegade and finally finished her with the 
 crushing retort, " Skin ? what size of a skin have you got ? 
 Had your skin been as big as mine and as beautiful, never a 
 day would they have left it on your back : you too would 
 have shared our ' flayed fate.' " 
 
 These Lunda people have a curious system of accurate 
 wireless telegraphy and their little Mondo drum does it 
 all. Far across the Luapula marshes the natives cock their 
 ears to receive its tell-tale messages. Is a white man 
 approaching, and is the said white a Missionary, not a 
 warrior 1 Does he wear a blue, black or white coat, or no 
 coat at all ? Yea, all these things are nimbly told out by the 
 mighty tambour-telephono Mondo. Is it peace ? Then 
 its sibUant whispers voice the same. Is it joy ? Then this 
 local Eeuter throbs out the pleasing news thereof. Is it, 
 alas ! sorrow, even the sorrow of death 1 Then it moans 
 out the name and address of mortal man, mortal malady. 
 At the villages ahead we find the news has all been so 
 telegraphed on, and a common phrase is " We heard per 
 Mondo last night that accredited travellers were setting 
 out," or " per Mondo came the warning of possible attack 
 from the west," etc. 
 
 But what puts the authentic Eeuter's stamp on all this 
 is the definite code of signals used. These are all known to 
 experts, and the cunning of the art lies in the skilful string- 
 ing of them together. Add to this the astounding articu- 
 lation of the thing, not a dull senseless rub-a-dub, but a 
 drum with a tongue wagging out even gossip : a drum that, 
 provided you do not crack it, can actually crack a joke. 
 Again and again, across some miles you can hear from a 
 group of silent negroes a burst of laughter — they are 
 laughing at the pleasant wit of Mr, Mondo five miles off. 
 
104 SOUTH TO THE GRAVE 
 
 One of the jokes is that chestnut about " Ingeresa " — 
 Livingstone — as he is called, and refers to the nickname 
 they gave him : the man who has no toes (i.e. they are 
 hidden in his boots). No toes, yet he travelled so far: 
 ho ! ho ! ho ! 
 
 The Kang eats in a mysterious mode called Kapodio, 
 the double idea being that he must eat when and how no 
 one else can. The most extraordinary part of his extra- 
 ordinary procedure is this : Kazembe dines to the music 
 of a torrent of curses, two old doctors being famous " male- 
 dictors " who pour out a cataract of vituperation on the 
 great Mwata's head. This cursing all happens in a private 
 dining-room where the royal glutton squats behind a 
 large veil covering his face, and the curious process of 
 mastication is as inelegant as their own word coined to 
 describe it, the " guzzling " it is called. Which being 
 interpreted means that it is taboo for the great Mwata 
 to take more than one bite of food, hence the curious 
 " python " method of swallowing at one gasp a great junk. 
 But, say fish and mush is the diet for the day, how can 
 Kazembe have his literal bite of food without choking 
 over the fish-bones ? This difiiculty is met by cooking only 
 the fish-fiesh, and when the chief has pushed home one 
 long sausage of meat and mush, then out shriek the curses 
 of the attendants. The little Mondo, too, snarls its wire- 
 less telegraphy maledictions, the rat-a-tat messenger 
 running : K. should die ! die ! He is no man : a beast ! 
 Kill the beast; oh ! son of Temena (his mother's name this). 
 
 This inevitable little drum, though, has more serious 
 business on during the royal dining and its call is really 
 a warning to all the town that no person may eat when the 
 King is eating. For like the Khan of Tartary, who finally 
 fired a post-prandial gun to tell all the world that it could 
 now eat because he of Tartary had eaten, so too with our 
 inflated Kazembe. The little Mondo; once so snarling and 
 stand-ofiish in its telegrams; now soothes your ruffled 
 feelings with a gracious message that you may eat and be 
 thankful, has not The Kazembe had his " bite " of food 1 
 First in dignity, is he not also first in time ? And first in 
 time, must he not also be first in fashion ? Hence the 
 
OF THE HEART 105 
 
 double law : Thou shalt not eat as and when the monarch 
 eats ; eclipse first, the rest nowhere. 
 
 This curious wrong-way-round cursing began long ago 
 when these fish were being caught. Cursed in the cooking; 
 they are likewise cursed in the catching. Transacting, in 
 honest ways, the honest business of a fisherman, it is a pity 
 he spoils it all by a curious mid-Lake ceremony called 
 " the cursing." What this amounts to is a fierce cataract 
 of oaths in which he apostrophises the dead men drowned 
 in the Lake. Singling them out by name, he curses them 
 with all the gall and bitterness of a presumably doomed 
 man, the presumption being that, all alone as he is in far 
 mid-Lake, in a mere cockle-shell canoe, the dead will drag 
 him down to the deep. Then a pause, but the stubborn 
 silence of the Lake oiJ.y stiffens him in his resolve to keep 
 cursing. 
 
 Making a clean circle of the Lake hamlets, he challenges 
 the dead chiefs by name, his volley of oaths {Mafinge) being 
 to the accompaniment of a rat-a-tat noise he makes with 
 a drumstick on the side of the boat. The livelier the fish 
 tug at his two long lines tied to his two great toes, the 
 louder do these curses rend the air. Certes, if ever food 
 needed to be " sanctified by prayer," these fish, the fruit 
 of cursing, deserve a purifying " grace before meat." 
 Yet what shall we see the great Kazembe do with these 
 very fish ? WiU he, too, not dine to a similar cataract 
 of curses ? the very fish cursed in their catching being again 
 cursed in their cooking. Yet here, incredulous as it may 
 seem, the wheel goes full circle once again, and the erst- 
 while cmser can now be heard singing a solemn Te Deum. 
 This fisherman, remember, claims he is only cursing 
 demons, thus it is he forthwith with the same mouth 
 blesses God. 
 
 Certain it is that for centuries this quaint old song of 
 deliverance has been sung as a cast-iron formula by all 
 Shila men who were capsized but came safe to land. Greet- 
 ing jhim with song at the Njiko, or landing-place, all the 
 women-folk burst out into a " God-song," as it is called, 
 the escaped fisherman joining them in the chorus. Simple 
 enough in its diction, the whole value of this praise-song 
 
106 SOUTH TO THE GRAVE 
 
 is to be found in its archaic terminology, the very grammar 
 of the thing being steeped in most ancient twang : 
 
 " Ood, the minnows 
 
 Had nigh feasted on me, 
 But Thou, God, 
 Didst rescue me," 
 
 Then, when the " praise procession " reaches the hamlet, 
 first among all his treasures to be produced is the great 
 " horn of salvation," as it is called, a horn this crammed full 
 of charms, and in symbolic idea a real cornucopia. All 
 life's successes are ascribed to its mediation, and the 
 " horn is exalted " accordingly. 
 
 These days, failing a finer grade of flour, we are punishing, 
 in a desperately dissipated manner, large messes of native 
 mush. This manioc is art and part of every native 
 woman's work, and the more pronoimced the degree of 
 decomposition, the more it is assumed to be an appetising 
 article of diet. Put it down to prejudice or palate, but 
 this preliminary putrefying of porridge, before making 
 a meal, pleases you little and puzzles you more. Not so 
 their simpler cereals, such as what they call " the rainy- 
 day beans." When these are boiled by some person 
 with brains, and in six or seven waters, I assure you they 
 induce one to face fearlessly the oncoming issues of life. 
 Thus you, far away without ever seeing the same, can sus- 
 pect that this funny forest cuisine, while admirable as far 
 as it goes, yet leaves too much to the imagination. Never- 
 theless according to masculine standards we do full justice 
 to this one-course meal for the million. Besides in this 
 vegetarianism you have the abiding culinary consolation 
 of no spectre of biliousness hovering at your elbow. And, 
 at least, the canteen arrangements are satisfactory : with 
 a fine suggestion of affluence the adjacent river runs full 
 and free, faithful fluid of our race, better far than " soda 
 and something." 
 
 Kazembe's mouth works in and out to assist the slow 
 processes of his hemp-numbed brain. These days his 
 downsitting and uprising seem all shut up into one desire 
 which he doubles in the participial phrase, " desiring I 
 have desired " — what ? In short, the great king is coldly 
 
OF THEIHEART 107 
 
 and carefully anxious that I get a parrot for him. Point- 
 ing over to our Far Interior, " Yours," says he, " is the 
 parrot country over there, and no Mwata Kazembe can 
 hope to retain his throne without a parrot." The Lubans 
 are keen on them, and this reminds me of some parrots 
 given by the Arab Raschid's wife to an ofl&cial on the Congo, 
 each bird having picked up some Swahili phrase the way 
 it picks up peas. Drifting downstream, flocks of wild grey 
 parrots would fly overhead to their feeding-grounds whist- 
 ling and shrieking. The tame parrots in their master's 
 canoe were too snugly domesticated to care a fig for such 
 mad fly-away freedom. What did they do but acknowledge 
 afl&nitywith their poor relations in best School Board 
 manner by crying up conceitedly as they passed overhead, 
 " Good morning ! " " What news ? " "I hope you are 
 weU ! " " Sit stiU ! " " Don't disturb yourself ! " All 
 Swahili stock phrases, all picked up in their present 
 parrot paradise — ^pure conceit ! The lofty parrots were 
 not high in the air, but in the canoe on a string. Alas, 
 sometimes these snatch phrases are more nasty than nice. 
 Instance, the well-known parrot that went east and changed 
 masters and manners twice : No. 1 was a trader who 
 taught the bird swearing, No. 2 a Missionary who taught 
 him singing, poor Poll muddling up the swearing and 
 singing in Ms old age, out of the same mouth blessing and 
 cursing, therewith blessed he God, therewith cursed he 
 men. 
 
 This reminds me how they tell of Livingstone travelling 
 to the musical screech of his Manyema parrots. Then 
 they add to the parrots his stubby little milch goats 
 waddling along with dripping nipples. Then his half-way 
 rest (telekesa) at some en route river for the favourite slap- 
 jacks or dampers washed down with the liquid assistance 
 of six or seven (yes !) cups of tea. This was the swagger 
 moment when Majiwara flourished Stanley's silver teapot 
 in the face of all amazed aboriginal onlookers, the sheen of 
 that silver, so Livingstone wrote, fulfilling even the 
 critical standard of an English butler. This is the same 
 " slow, slow " Majiwara who was also drummer-boy for 
 the caravan, and led the rub-a-dub way along the trail. 
 
108 SOUTH TO THE GRAVE 
 
 He it was who had first dealings with Livingstone every 
 morning, giving him his 5 a.m. stinging coffee that " gar- 
 galises the night out of the throat," as the natives put it. 
 
 Later, and farther on, comes bivouac with sun-down 
 made by Halimah herself, the sticky stuff that caused run- 
 away Stanley to wail in despair, "' Oh for a wheaten loaf,' 
 my soul cried in agony, ' 500 dollars for one loaf of bread.' " 
 Made every day as fresh food, it was an old African insult, 
 actionable at law, to ask anyone to eat cold mush ; " chim- 
 hara," it is then called, and food for dogs. Thus Africa 
 sees a double meaning ia the old prayer, " Give us this day 
 our daily bread." Cooked in and for one day, it is all 
 finished off that same day. Dr. Johnson once desired 
 " to write a cookery book on philosophical principles," and 
 here in this African mush would have been his chance for 
 a whole chapter of expatiation on edibles. 
 
 No doubt suitable protests wiU crowd to the lips when 
 you hear that we ate a rat to-day. But this rat by any 
 other name would taste as sweet. It was Livingstone who 
 put us up to it : there is a " Last Journals " item that he, 
 too, had rat for supper, real rat and good eating. Kitoweo 
 or munani is the great word here and weakly Englished as 
 " relish." This is the " one thing needful " of the Martha 
 and Mary episode, and whether as fish, flesh or cereals 
 it is generically called " mpishishyo " or " it slips it [the 
 dry bread] down." No munani means no supper because 
 the said supper lacks this ^ fluid J flesh thing called " it 
 slips it down." Mere mush must, de rigueur, be washed 
 down with the liquid assistance of this culinary concomi- 
 tant, and it is despised when as a mere thick porridge it has 
 no " kitchen " to grease its downward progress. Although 
 the African never had a printed dictionary, this " relish " 
 word bulks biggest in the lexicon of his lips. He is 
 astoimded that we have not a verbal English equivalent 
 for this " one-thing-is-needful " Kitoweo. Like his year 
 that halves into a dry and a wet season, so each meal is a 
 miniature year that must have its correlative " wet " 
 sauce for the dry sop of mush so greased down. " One's 
 bread and hutter " is a faint English hint of the idea, faiut 
 but hypocritical because we mean much more than mere 
 
OF THE HEART 109 
 
 butter on bread in our gastronomic exertions. Not so 
 this one-tHng-is-needful negro ; a rat one day, beans the 
 next, fish another day, and so on as anxious alternatives 
 for different days but never two sorts of relish for the same 
 meal. Suf&cient unto the day is the " relish " thereof. 
 This is the word Christ used when He asked His disciples, 
 " Children, have ye any ' relish ' ? " The dry bread He 
 presumed to be in their possession already. But Christ 
 wanted them to have something tasty and fresh, hence His 
 calling on them to cast the net on the right side of the ship 
 to catch the " one-thing-is-needful " relish.' 
 
 Meanwhile here is The Kazembe with big Bourbon face 
 looking down on us in a scared and scandalised manner. 
 We unfortunate " Godites " {vena Leza), born to correct 
 the world, bom to tilt at African windmills of prejudice 
 centuries old ! Livingstone did it, Livingstone died in 
 doing it, the same death devouring good and bad. Why 
 then can we pretend to be so specially " Godites " when our 
 own God grants us no exemption from this devastating 
 death, enemy of all, small and tall, poor and princely ? 
 So this is aU the gruesome " gospel " Nature has for them. 
 
 It is easy to talk loosely of Nature softening men's 
 hearts, but Paul agrees with Tennyson's " Nature red in 
 tooth and claw " when he says that " the whole creation 
 groaneth and travaileth together in pain until now." 
 
 ^ Greatest, therefore commonest word in Central Africa, this is the dipping- 
 the-sop word that makes the Bishops blink, for it nullifies twenty thousand 
 sermons they have preached with the wrong idea : I mean, that this grease-it- 
 down Kitoweo is the dead-sure meaning of Paul's famous phrase " the loages 
 of sin is death." We African translators are cowards in not giving " wages " 
 its famous classical meaning of this technical term, " relish." Why should 
 we kow-tow to the Jerusalem Chamber (poor thing !) that had no such word in 
 currency, therefore could not give what it never had ? We in Africa have 
 the very word they lacked. " The wages," i.e. the Kitoiveo or " relish," of 
 sin is death, that is the oily and insidious thing that greases it down, sweet 
 to the taste but " bitter to the belly," as the Prophet puts it. " Wages " is 
 not the idea at any rate, unless there is any sense in saying that the fish 
 rations served out to the Roman soldier who chained Paul were his wages, for 
 this is what the original word (opsonion) means. No ; it is a dose of daily 
 death Paul means, not the terminal " second death " of esohatology. It is 
 not a " good time " the sinner is having, says the Apostle, for every sin is 
 really a " dipping the sop " into the " relish " of death. First the mess of 
 red pottage and then the exceeding bitter cry — " We did not know." We 
 did not Imow. 
 
110 SOUTH TO THE GRAVE OF THE HEART 
 
 And it is precisely this moan pouring into the negro ear that 
 makes him think of God as a malignant demon, mocking 
 at his pain, and pouring contempt upon his life. The 
 impassive serenity of Nature in all the struggles and anguish 
 of life maddens him into open revolt. For do not the 
 serene stars rise and set with callous calmness over the 
 storm and stress of his life ? There is the Gospel of Nature 
 for you. Moral : Herein is love : not that we get to love 
 God by looking out on cruel Nature, but that He loved us 
 and sent His Son a Victim of the same cruelty. Sent also 
 Messrs. Livingstone & Co. as messengers of that Fact. 
 
 All along this trail the almost penurious absence of other 
 obstacles is indemnified by the plague of " black jacks " 
 (soTcontwe). Take two steps into the grass, then two more, 
 and these black jaggy things stick into your clothes like 
 ten thousand miniature quills of a porcupine. Thus you 
 pay for your progress through the grass in the ratio of so 
 many yards for so many thousands of these soTcontwe. 
 Thus it is, too, all these road-blocking chiefs seize on the 
 pertinence of this parable and call themselves vasoTcontwe, 
 " the black jacks " who refuse a traveller right of way 
 without prior jagging. Put " black " for his pigment and 
 " jack " for their jagging and never did adjective so 
 certainly qualify noun. 
 
CHAPTEE VIII 
 MORE ABOUT THIS MAN 
 
 They tell us that the face of this 
 Livingstone was " set fair." And the 
 reason for all his serenity of soul was his 
 refusal to fret at delays because he had 
 anchored on the axiom : " That which is 
 to last for ever takes a long time to grow." 
 
" You enclose the cutting about Lieutenant Graetz. Well ! When 
 you hear a grunt you know there is a -pig about. I get so inured to 
 remarks of that kind about missions and missionary converts that it 
 makes no impression upon me now." 
 
 J. S. Moffat. 
 
 " Dear Mr. , 
 
 " / have duly received your complaint against that old native 
 in particular and all natives in general. You and I differ rather 
 radically on this subject, but I again venture to hint that {seeing you 
 have been such a short time in the country) my knowledge however 
 limited cannot be controverted by your ignorance however extensive. 
 
 " Yours truly, 
 
 "Z>. C." 
 
 {A Postcard.) 
 
CHAPTER VIII 
 MORE ABOUT THIS MAN 
 
 HERE on his old trail, it will be as impossible to keep 
 the name of Dr. Livingstone out of this chronicle 
 as it was to keep the head of King Charles I out 
 of Mr, Dick's memorial. We gather, for example, that his 
 was a deeply furrowed face and pretty well tanned. Of 
 quick and keen discernment, strong impulses, inflexible 
 resolution, and habitual self-command. Unanimated, its 
 most characteristic expression was that of severity, lots 
 of laughter being latent behind this mask of solemnity. 
 
 Here are some simple old African ladies who Jmew 
 Livingstone, and this reminds me that by far the most 
 pleasurable phase of Dr. Livingstone's African life was his 
 sans feur et sans reproche dealings with the women of 
 Central Africa. Sprinkled all over the Last Journals 
 you have many a pawky little picture of them, with always 
 the same access of pleasurable dignity to his pen. A tiny 
 tincture of austerity in it all, perhaps, for had he not laid 
 down the law that " the polite respectful way of speaking 
 and behaviour of what we call ' a thorough gentleman ' 
 almost always secures the friendship and goodwill of the 
 Africans " ? There was an inner circle, too : the brave band 
 of women, Halimah and Co., who went right down with 
 him into the Valley of Death. No donkey for them to ride, 
 no palanquin. They worked down for him the coarser 
 native meal into a passable flour ; they drew the water 
 and gathered faggots ; they went out in search of mush- 
 rooms when the last calf was kiUed. They, finally, on his 
 death-day, cooked for him the last make-believe dish at 
 his own request, gruesome dish for a dysenteric patient, 
 millet and peanuts crushed in the mortar of wood ! 
 
 Only mere chattels in the slave-market these women : 
 8 113 
 
114 MORE ABOUT THIS MAN 
 
 therefore, all of them of easy virtue in the sense that change 
 of master in slavery means change of man. Yet Living- 
 stone's written rule runs, " I shall try equitably and gently 
 to make allowances for human weakness, though that weak- 
 ness has caused me much sufiering." Courtesy has been 
 called " kindness dressed up," but here you have hundreds 
 of imdressed people who are as courteous as could be. 
 Fancy a mother so anxious to say " please " to her child 
 that she calls him " Father " as an equivalent for " please," 
 then puts it all in the subjunctive mood to soften off her 
 maternal request for some small service he renders her. 
 The reader need not be a prey of ambiguities if he remem- 
 ber that these near-naked old women rule the African roost. 
 There is the famous case of Cecil Khodes and how the 
 mediation of one such old " sack of bones " saved Rhodesia 
 from civil war. To this day on the wall of Rhodes's bed- 
 room at Groote Schuur hangs the faded picture of an old 
 and shrivelled Matabele woman. She was one of the 
 wives of Umziligazi, father of Lobengula, and is so honoured 
 because, in the words of General Smuts, " That is the 
 woman who acted as the chief negotiator between Rhodes 
 and the rebels." The moment the second Matabele war 
 began, ofi ran Rhodes up north to his namesake, Rhodesia. 
 There it was, out near his future grave, he made a camp ia 
 the wilds ; refused the aid of Plumer's command five miles 
 away, and with three unarmed companions began to mediate 
 through this old lady with the most blood-thirsty savages 
 in all Africa, Thanks to this " sable sister," the chiefs 
 one by one came down from the hills, after two months of 
 mediation, and abiding peace was cemented in sincerity. 
 Rhodes never could or would forget the service she rendered 
 him and caused her treasured photograph to be taken, So 
 down they go into history, Rhodes the warp and she the 
 woof of such a great work of conciliation. Handsome is as 
 handsome does, therefore let us see in that faded photo 
 of the shrivelled old soul in Rhodes's bedroom at The Cape, 
 a symbol of many such who in the greater concern of 
 Christianity can mediate a much more momentous mercy 
 between man and God. Hence aU Livingstone's concern 
 for these weird old feminine worthies. 
 
MORE ABOUT THIS MAN 115 
 
 But depend upon it, a costly concern this as-gracious- 
 as-you-please code of his turned out to be. When 
 all was packed up and they were just off, sometimes a 
 motherly-looking woman, all smiles and simplicity, would 
 bring out a present of meal as though the thing could carry 
 itself. But as each load was at its limit, and each man had 
 his load, this all-smiles-and-simplicity gift of meal could 
 not be accepted. So away goes soft-hearted Livingstone 
 with this forced rebuff jarring on him the whole day, and 
 the evening sees him confessing to his Journal : "It would 
 have been better to have accepted it : some give merely 
 out of kindly feeling with no prospect of a return. It is 
 sheer kindliness that prompts them sometimes, though 
 occasionally people do make presents with a view of 
 gettiag a larger one in return : it is pleasant to find it is 
 not always so." 
 
 " He is loriting a letter to himself " is the native boy's 
 discrimination between the daily jottings his master makes 
 in his Diary and the other letters he sends ofE per post. 
 Certainly, in Livingstone's Last Journals the old man lays 
 down the law to himself quite a lot, a law so lofty that it 
 includes in its sweep the crowds of semi-nude women all 
 aroimd him. " A pleasant-looking lady," he writes of 
 one of them, " her face profusely tattooed, came forward 
 with a bunch of sweet reed, and laid it at my feet, saying, ' I 
 met you here before,' pointing to the spot on the river where 
 we turned. I remember her coming then, and that I 
 asked the boy to wait while she went to bring us a basket 
 of food. She had a quiet, dignified manner, both in talking 
 and walking, and I now gave her a small looking-glass, 
 and she went and brought me her only fowl and a basket 
 of cucumber seeds, from which oil is made ; from the 
 amount of oily matter they contain they are nutritious when 
 roasted and eaten as nuts. She made an apology, saying 
 they were hungry times at present. I gave her a cloth, and 
 so parted with Kanangone." 
 
 When Stanley came in from the racketing world and 
 " found " Livingstone at Ujiji, they had quite a lot of 
 " talking the sun up." Many months of verbal arrears 
 had to be worked off, the hoardings of enforced reticence. 
 
116 MORE ABOUT THIS MAN 
 
 Many a good laugh, rang out at many a better hon mot, 
 for brain had met its match in " brother-brain." Yet 
 there they were, men every inch of them, men not monkeys, 
 with no " east of Suez " attempt at acquiescence in " the 
 custom of the country " code of immorality. He is an 
 ex-Missionary this Livingstone, the very " ex " usually 
 connoting more suffix than prefix. I mean connotes more, 
 much more than it really does denote. Yet as those faggots 
 flare by the camp fires, Stanley, night after night, is bound 
 by the spell of salvation. Livingstone seemingly is so 
 eminently one of Christ's men that Stanley can believe 
 there is a Christ because there is a Livingstone. " Here 
 is," writes Stanley, " a man who is manifestly sustained 
 as well as guided by influences from Heaven. The Holy 
 Spirit dwells in him : God speaks through him. The 
 heroism, the nobility, the pure and stainless enthusiasm 
 at the root of his life came beyond question from Christ. 
 There must, therefore, be a Christ, and it is worth while 
 to have such a Helper and Redeemer as this Christ im- 
 doubtedly is, as He reveals Himself in this wonderful 
 disciple." Surely, all this got home to Stanley's heart 
 with indelible certitude because (I must reiterate it !) 
 tweeds was talking to tweeds, layman to layman, and the 
 nearest professional parson hundreds of miles away. 
 
 " Custom of the country,- indeed ! " Livingstone, with 
 an imsmUing face that leaves you in doubt whether the 
 remark is intended for a joke or the expression of a moral 
 hypothesis, argued rightly that " custom " and " costume " 
 is only a case of spelling the same Latin word in six letters 
 instead of seven. Therefore if you adopt the native 
 " custom " of promiscuity, why not literally go the whole 
 hog and dress in the nude native " costume " ! Do we not 
 speak of a lady's riding habit and her bad habit of smoking 
 cigarettes ? Therefore " custom " means very much 
 " costmne." 
 
 This surprise of Stanley's is all part and parcel of the 
 African story. Down around Zanzibar the " east of Suez " 
 sort had stuffed him with the usual lies about " the idol." 
 (1) That Livingstone possessed a splenetic, misanthropic 
 temper. (2) That he was garrulous and demented. (3) 
 
MORE ABOUT THIS MAN 117 
 
 That lie was utterly changed from the David Livingstone 
 whom people knew as the reverend missionary. (4) With 
 not too feeble attempt to be evasive — ^the usual " black 
 woman " insinuation. " I defy/' says Stanley, " I defy 
 anyone to be in his society long without thoroughly 
 fathoming him, for in him there is no guile, and what is 
 apparent on the surface is the thing that is in him. I 
 simply write down my own opinion of the man as I have seen 
 him, not as he represents himseK ; as I know him to be, 
 not as I have heard of him. I lived with him from the 
 10th November, 1871, to the 14th March, 1872 ; witnessed 
 his conduct ia the camp, and on the march, and my feelings 
 for him are those of unqualified admiration." 
 
 But, as I have remarked already, Livingstone's counten- 
 ance had by this time set at the serene stage when anything 
 could happen. Eight ofi at the beginning of his mis- 
 sionary career he had heard five of his colleagues, married 
 men all of them, roundly accused of immoral living. But 
 wrote he, " the charge in each case has been quite groundless." 
 There spoke the man who saw the drift of things, saw that 
 the Devil's own name was " the accuser of the brethren," 
 saw that this devil's deed of accusing others means excusing 
 themselves, " accuser four s'excuser." The 1611 version 
 is far more polite than Paul ; twice the Apostle speaks of 
 " false accusers," but his word is " devils " (diaboloi). 
 
 It is the same old sinister story : the geography of Africa 
 is akin to its morality. And if you accept the crushing 
 old certainty that " Character is what a man is in the dark," 
 then you have only to modify your noun as an adjective 
 and what do you get ? Why, this, that Character is what 
 a man is all alone in — ^the Dark Continent. Livingstone, 
 long ago, did the right thing when he packed up, and off 
 he went with wife and child on his first exploration. Where 
 God called any man had not women a corresponding call 
 to go to the same place with the same person ? But when 
 at last she died, it was a mourning widower who held on 
 his way thinking of the happy old days beginning away back 
 towards the end of 1844. " A matter-of-fact lady," was 
 his picture of her, " a little thick, black-haired girl, sturdy 
 and aU I want." He would have agreed with General 
 
118 MORE ABOUT THIS MAN 
 
 Bootli, another Explorer, tlie Explorer of Darkest England : 
 " My wife is in Heaven and I have no home, merely a place 
 where I keep some furniture. How old do they say I am ? 
 Seventy-nine ? What nonsense ! I am not old. I am 
 seventy-nine years young. I have heaps of time yet to 
 go around fishing — ^fishing for souls in the same old way 
 with the same old net." 
 
 These native women can be brave to madness where their 
 graceless sons are concerned. Masaka was one such and 
 here he is dragged in bleeding. His haggard old mother 
 follows him bleeding likewise, for both of them have been 
 saved out of a crocodile's mouth. It is a tale passing 
 strange but enacted " right here and now," as the local 
 idiom runs {fehx feka pano). They were in a canoe and 
 finally grounded among the matete reeds. The day was hot 
 and my fellow slipped overboard into the water for a 
 " cooler " as the sand was shallow. He was scarcely in 
 the water when this aquatic deputy of the devil snapped at 
 him and got him in his jaws, an easy prey. But (no fear, 
 not so easy !) that old mother of his will deliver or die : 
 if her boy goes she will go too. Therefore with primitive 
 pluck in she springs after the beast, and there she is actually 
 daring to attack empty-handed this blood-mad saurian. 
 It is for his gleaming mouth she makes, determined to 
 unlock those jaws that have her first-born in their deadly 
 grip. Can you take it in ? Her plan is to wheedle the 
 crocodile into biting her instead of biting her thankless 
 boy. Succeed ? Yes, in the desperate sense that in so 
 gripping the jaws she has forced the monster to leave ofE 
 gripping her son, and thus materialise the maternal pro- 
 gramme by biting her instead. But not for long, you be- 
 lieve it. Her blood is up as weU as out : in her struggles 
 she forces the gleaming teeth to let go, but this (so she says 
 afterwards) was a tactical error. For the animal having 
 tasted blood wants more, so back he springs on her boy out 
 of whose back he has already dug bits of flesh. And now 
 it comes to this : on comes the royal mother to renew 
 the attack, but this time she is not handicapped with empty 
 hands : she has broken off a stout stick, rushes for the red 
 mouth of the monster and, brave old thing, rams it down 
 
'I'lfK .-'I'lldXl-W I l-I.KIi Wn/.liX TVI'E. 
 
 lit 
 
MORE ABOUT THIS MAN 119 
 
 the terrible throat, thus releasing her son from its clutch. 
 Victory ! Away goes the disconcerted animal, having 
 learned a sad but salutary lesson. Last comes the splendid 
 service of Mrs. Crawford with the gaping onlookers adoring 
 every inch of snow-white bandage winding round the 
 wounds ; well they know that the land crocodile of blood 
 poisoning kiUs more natives than the other in the Lake. 
 
 A snapshot of these native women would reveal many a 
 mediocre face, yet their liquid lingo is full of clever phras- 
 ing. Armed to the finger-tips with finish and polish, 
 this is the dowager who brings six pots of beer to Living- 
 stone's camp for his men, explaining apologetically that 
 she brings only six pots of water. Does she cook meat for 
 him ? then she regrets it is only vegetables. Or is it only 
 vegetables, the hunters having failed to kill any game ? then 
 she asks him to " eat affliction." And must he refuse 
 her invitation ? then the polite formula is : "I am not 
 refusing." And are the lions roaring out on the plain ? 
 then she says, " The dogs are barking, sir." AU super- 
 correct, aU absurdly polite, and (this is the point !) all 
 " highbrow " speech in clean contradiction to her illiterate 
 appearance. 
 
 Granmaar, have I not already said she has sixteen genders 
 to the noun and twenty-three tenses to the verb ? Contrast 
 our stingy English three genders (or classes) with this solid 
 sixteen in Africa. And our indelicacy of making feminine 
 gender the mark of a class. The African may be nude, 
 but when he looks round Nature to classify all things, he 
 wouldn't dare, as we have done, to fasten on sex as mark 
 of gender, i.e. class. Besides they are so conceivably 
 many that he can only do it on the modest minimum of 
 sixteen divisions or classes (i.e. genders, same word). 
 Thus things are categorised as (1) living or dead ; as (2) 
 long and streaky or short or stubby ; as (3) soft, flabby 
 or hard and unyielding ; as (4) augmentative or diminu- 
 tive ; and above all — oh ! stroke of grammatical genius — 
 as (5) abstract, the great abstract ,class that comprehends 
 wisdom, glory, love and the like. 
 
 Here you have Mr. Sixteen Genders Africanus stalking 
 out of the grass and insisting that, at least, all abstract 
 
120 MORE ABOUT THIS MAN 
 
 ideas must be classed in one concise category or gender. 
 Tell him that we have only three genders, one an indecent 
 one, and he scorns us as the rubbish of the race. But we 
 get our revenge : the origin of many of their words is as 
 amazing as amusing ; " the free-will " of man, for instance. 
 This is chifu cha nguluve = a pig's stomach affair, and refers 
 to their notorious custom when cutting up a pig, that aU 
 or any portion of the pig is bestowable except its infra dig. 
 stomach. This is neither saleable nor stealable ; any- 
 one can ofE with it, no " by your leave " being necessary. 
 Thus " free-will " (a word not without some claims to be 
 called the word of humanity), lo, here you have it most 
 inelegantly masquerading as " a pig's stomach affair." 
 By that free-will man sees, by that same he is blind ; he 
 is free through his will and through his will a slave ; he is 
 honest through that same wiU, and thjough his will a 
 rogue. Yet the didactic dignity of all this is cheapened and 
 coarsened (is it, I wonder ?) by calling it " a pig's stomach " 
 affair. 
 
 Or take this desecration of the supposedly sacred 
 word " peace," mutende. Here surely is a word that claims 
 the respect of the very man whose throat is kept uncut by 
 the blessing of immunity from midnight raiders. Glad ? 
 No, he merely yawns so literally that this noun for " peace " 
 is only another spelling of that ugly modern little slang 
 verb, tendwa, " to be fed up." Thus the noun for " peace " 
 is only a verbal yawn, spoiling-for-a-scrap yawn ! This is 
 proved from the meaning of that great sister-greeting of 
 theirs, " Mwa poleni, mukwai ? " Like " mutende ? " it 
 is an interrogation, not an invocation, and means, " Are 
 your wounds healed, sir ? " A war-bled equivalent for, 
 " I wish you well ! " 
 
 But to revert to those terrible tenses : the more you muse 
 on this " grammar " expedient the more amusing such a 
 linguistic fake becomes. Why demand that the African 
 should have the self-same verbal mould as ourselves ? 
 Who ever heard of a past-tense noun ? Yet, such is the 
 Chibemba phrase, ine wa fikile mailo = I the-yesterday- 
 arrived-one. Or a future tense noun : imwe va Icesa mailo = 
 You the-will-come-to-morrow ones. Here, then, you have 
 
MORE ABOUT THIS MAN 121 
 
 a verb easily a noun — and in all its tortuous tenses, too. 
 Yet th.e oncoming EngHsh translator, with the deft touch 
 of long malpractice, wiU politely and particularly kiU all 
 this. Kill it because English has no past tense noun, then 
 (bow-wow !) why should " lesser breeds " have the same ? 
 
 Therefore, instead of just floundering on, my advice to 
 aU you exquisites far away is to start in and learn to read 
 God in His own glorious Greek and Hebrew : you wiU get 
 to understand Him better. When Paul spoke to the people 
 in their own tongue we read that they were the more silent. 
 And so, too, when I read God in His own Greek it gets me 
 nearer. His words both bind and liberate and are not the 
 poor timid little phrases of conventional conversation. A 
 charming and cultured old friend has just sent me a stiff 
 admonition to try to stop long hyphenated phrases and be 
 " more Biblical " in my speech. And that is just where 
 the trouble comes in. For if I am soaked in God's Greek 
 then the original forces me to make a long tongue-twister 
 of it and call Paul " an-against-the-people-and-the-law- 
 and-this-place-aU-men-everywhere-teacher. So, too, to be 
 scriptural, I must talk of grass as " the-to-day-existing-and- 
 to-morrow-cast-into-an-oven-grass." Or to speak, sweetly 
 but strictly, of our Lord as " The endurer-of-such-contra- 
 diction-of-sinners-against-Himself-One." Voild ! God 
 wrote it that way, at any rate. So do not let us be paro- 
 chial, parish-pump folk who think that the world begins 
 at our piUow and ends at the foot of the bed. 
 
 The lovely play of short and long tenses here follows the 
 pure Greek analogy and should make any future Bible 
 translator jump for joy. Wooden old English has killed 
 these pictorial imperfects : they are a " moving panorama " 
 and by switching on an imperfect for an aorist " the 
 flowing stream of history is seen passing before the eye." 
 ("In Matthew iii. 4, 5, 6 the whole vivid Jordan scene is 
 sketched by simply using an imperfect " — A. T. Robertson.) 
 Here, then, is a gold mine, but will our African translators 
 betray both Greek and Chibemba into the hands of dear 
 old no-future-tense English ? For we, oh ! we had ebbed 
 so low linguistically that we had no " future," had it not, 
 so faked one by stealing a verb called " shall " and another 
 
122 MORE ABOUT THIS MAN 
 
 verb called " will," yes, faked a future tense. Hence our 
 old juvenile troubles in manipulating our schoolboy 
 " shall " or " wiU." It was all an improvisation, all a 
 stilted invention, nothing more. We had no future, so we 
 borrowed two verbs and made one. 
 
 To all the hummers and hawers who deplored the danger 
 of his African enterprise, Livingstone repeated what the 
 Arab, Sef Eupia, told him of the number of slavers who 
 died in one year of their devil's-deputy slave raids. " Sef 
 Rupia," says Livingstone, " told me that about 100 of the 
 Kilwa slavers alone died this year, so slaving as well as 
 philanthropy is accompanied with loss of life : we saw 
 seven of their graves ; the rest died on the road up. It 
 struck me, after Sef had numbered the losses that the Kilwa 
 people sustained by death in their endeavours to enslave 
 people, surely similar losses on the part of those who go 
 ' to proclaim liberty to the captives, the opening of the 
 prison to them that are bound,' to save and elevate, need 
 not be made so very much of as they sometimes are." 
 Hence his call from a longing heart, " I would say to mis- 
 sionaries. Come on, brethen, to the real heathen ! You 
 have no idea how brave you are till you try. Leaving the 
 coast tribes, and devoting yourselves heartily to the sav- 
 ages, as they are called, you will find, with some drawbacks 
 and wickednesses, a very great deal to admire and love." 
 If Christ, said Livingstone, is such a superlative Saviour, 
 then where are His superlative servants ? Charles Wesley 
 deplored that the Devil should have all the good music : 
 profane music did not exist, only the profanation thereof. 
 And so with Livingstone and these venturesome hell- 
 hounds : why should the Devil have all the die-hards ? 
 The Paul who was so keen pro the devil, did he not see to 
 it that he served Christ superlatively so ? 
 
 So on we go with him — on into another chapter. 
 
CHAPTEE IX 
 STILL SOUTHING IT 
 
 These Africans would antagonise us 
 less if we ceased to blink the main 
 factor in this anti-racial folly. Our 
 failure, I mean, to permit old Sir Thomas 
 of Northioich to give us a prick of per- 
 turbation in the reminder that " we 
 di'ffer just as much from others as they 
 from us." 
 
" Now that I am on the point of starting on another trip {the last) 
 into Africa, I feel quite exhilarated. When one travels with the specific 
 object in view of ameliorating the condition of the natives, every ad 
 becomes ennobled. . . . The effect of travel on a man whose heart 
 is in the right place is that the mind is made more self-reliant : 
 it becomes more confident of its own resources — there is greater pre- 
 sence of mind. . . . The sweat of one's brow is no longer a curse 
 when one works for God ; it proves a tonic to the system, and is 
 actually a blessing. No one can truly appreciate the charm of repose 
 unless he has undergone severe exertion." 
 
 Livingstone. 
 
 " Seldom can the heart be lonely 
 If it seek a lonelier still. 
 Self-forgetting, seeking only 
 Emptier cups of love to fill." 
 
CHAPTER IX 
 STILL SOUTHING IT 
 
 THE nineteentli of June sees us pushing south through 
 long lanes of green manioc, accompanied for miles 
 by bands of boisterous Lunda boys with boundless 
 glee. Their names are either Kanyembo, Kinyanta, Luk- 
 wesa, Kapumba or some other high-sounding name of the 
 Kazembe d)niasty, and beyond this royal nomenclature 
 they seem to know nothing. Fancy England fxill of bounc- 
 ing boys called only after Tudor and Hanoverian kings. 
 These small boys are encyclopaedic, any one of them singing 
 out a long string of obscure forest insects, all, all, as utterly 
 lost to a foreigner as needle in haystack. Indeed, this 
 black walking encyclopaedia jabbers so endlessly that you 
 regret he cannot be treated like the one bound in leather — 
 at least you can shut that up. Here you have a precious 
 little piece of impertinence (aetat 7) spouting natural 
 history Uke a professor. The only book he knows is this 
 big many-paged volume of Nature : and (pedagogues, 
 please ponder) that book he knows so well simply because 
 he does not know it is a book. I mean that each morning 
 he springs from his mat to enter this vast library of Nature, 
 poking into every nook of the forest in a far fresher way than 
 we can poke into dry-as-dust books. And why not fresh, 
 for this thing is, whereas the dry book'merely tells about it. 
 Surely, this is the meaning of that unfathomably French 
 phrase for playing truant at school, " il fait I'ecole huisson- 
 nidre " ? 
 
 Thus what they lack in nurture they get in nature, 
 sharp as a needle and cunning as a fox. Besides, seeing 
 he is thus so deeply learned in the living literature of 
 Nature he proves this fact by being utterly unconscious 
 of his own erudition, the hall-mark of real knowledge. 
 
 125 
 
126 STILL SOUTHING IT 
 
 To a T eacli of these boys could teclmically claim to be a 
 sort of Solomon Junior, for " he spake of trees from the 
 cedar that is in Lebanon even unto the hyssop that spring- 
 eth out of the wall : he spake also of beasts and of fowl 
 and of creeping things and of fishes." With this difEerence 
 though, Solomon got 3,000 proverbs out of them and the 
 African gets (does he ?) 3,000,000. Even classifica- 
 tions, the awful anatomy of study, are sublimely simple 
 because they exist in clean-cut reality under his nose in 
 Nature ; trees, for instance, are all grouped by him in 
 what he calls " brotherhoods," the degrees of resemblance 
 being expressed by the various relationships of the human 
 family. That is to say, the trees classify themselves and 
 he merely acknowledges the fact. Nature a systematic 
 index and not a tangled jungle, such is the negro notion. 
 Unfortimately, as I have hinted, all this makes bvm mouthy 
 and a great chatterbox. Indeed so voluble do these little 
 walking dictionaries wax, that glad were we when these 
 forty quasi-senile chatterboxes yelled us off from the top 
 of a ridge. Adieu ! the Encyclopaedia Africana in forty 
 volumes boimd in best morocco. 
 
 But there are more farther on. Do not smile at my 
 infra dig. group of dirty little herd boys as audience in 
 the evening. They are the men of to-morrow and laugh at 
 life's masks and mummeries. The very job of a herd boy 
 is a challenge to Debrett. When Tennyson made " all the 
 blood of all the Howards " his maximum of aristocratic 
 status, look what an ineptitude he involved himself in. For 
 here I have the charming grandson of a duke assuring me 
 that the Howards were etymologicaUy the hog wards or pig 
 keepers, and this ancestor of the Duke of Norfolk was some- 
 thing like Gurth the Swineherd in Ivanhoe. And to prove 
 that this is no mere spiteful dig at a dukedom older than his 
 own, he complacently certifies that the Duke of Bedford is 
 descended from a fishmonger at Poole, as the Duke of 
 Devonshire descends from one of Wolsey's humble body- 
 servants. Go higher still and the surprise increases with 
 the ascent. To get among the Kings and Queens of England 
 is at least to be safely removed from (the realm of mere 
 question and conjecture. Here, then, is what the iron pen 
 
THE KXr'Y('L(JT/EriIA Al'I.'ICAXA l;()l'X|i IX I'.K-'J' _M(J I ;( iCe'lJ. 
 
 ETIEAK'IXO JX THE \(J[-X(;: J ;i J r.T,-(A LE AT XEW :?ESSloX. 
 
 120] 
 
STILL SOUTHING IT 127 
 
 of history records : A pot-gill of Westminster married the 
 master of the pot-house and she, on his demise, consulted 
 and married a solicitor named Hyde. Their daughter was 
 the mother of two Queens of England, Queen M,a,xj and 
 Queen Anne. 
 
 So cease from man whose breath is in his nostrils. Long 
 live my band of little herd boys. When Plato defined 
 Aristocracy as "The Eule of the Best Born," Aristotle 
 saw the weak point in the Platonic phrasing. Thus it is 
 the disciple modified it for the better by cutting ofi that 
 old vain-glorious " bom " and made it majestically " The 
 Rule of the Best." For he saw what we all see ; saw that 
 the erratic flesh is full of successional vagaries, and if a 
 man cannot even make one hair of his head white or 
 black, how much less can he guarantee the head, hand or 
 heart of his offspring ? What then ? Why all this plaint 
 about pedigree ? Simply and summarily to prove for my 
 herd boys that Jesus Christ meets both Plato and Aristotle 
 and blends their rival formulae into one. In Him it is no 
 longer the acrid antagonism of " The Rule of the Best 
 Bom " versus " The Rule of the Best." " The Best Bom " 
 are " The Best," because he is nobly bom who is bom from 
 above. For as sure as the first birth being of the earth 
 drags us down deterrantly, so, au contraire, the celestial 
 calls commandingly from its source, and wrests us from the 
 grip of the ground. Pulsford puts it aU in all when he 
 unfolds Livingstone's doctrine of the " double puU " thus : 
 
 " Time and eternity touch me, for I am both. Time assaults more for the dust 
 which I have, and insists that I give back to the dust every atom which I have 
 derived therefrom, Eternity appeals to me for the spirit which I have. Owing 
 to these two claimants, the partnership will soon have to be dissolved between my 
 soul and body, that earth may take its axon, and eternity its oum" 
 
 So SO for the lads, but what about the lassies ? This 
 is a bad enough story. If the day in the woods makes a 
 healthy animal, the negro night in the huts nearly undoes 
 it all. That very precocity of the African " picaninny," 
 at once a charm and an alarm, is all traceable to this 
 poisoned atmosphere of morals in the pigstye hut. Each 
 tot knows far too much, the future African matron having 
 lost her shy girlish ways at the early age of seven. The 
 
128 STILL SOUTHING IT 
 
 passing word we give is soon snatched away from the 
 cHldren, for no new ideas are allowed to build their nests 
 in these young brains. They must all grow up to wear the 
 tribal blinkers ; look neither to the right hand nor the left, 
 but straight in front of them, " look like a buffalo " is their 
 phrase for this " blinkers " idea of following only straight 
 ahead. 
 
 The secret society names nangulu and mulumbi tell the 
 tragedy that not one of these girls will escape the dark 
 orgie called " butwa," lit. the sharpening-up process, the 
 getting " smart " in a sexual sense from hutwa, " to be 
 sharp." The Ilala people make no subterfuge about it in 
 their totem being the old Greek symbol of phallic worship. 
 Thus nude man means nude notions : small wonder the 
 first thing God did to man on the road to redeem him was 
 to clothe him, clothe both his body and speech. 
 
 On moral and discretionary grounds you draw the curtain 
 here, otherwise you need an ugly paragraph in Juvenal's 
 Latin. What about the " Hottentot apron " beginning 
 at The Cape and ending in Abyssinia ? And the mad 
 trans-African idea to begin this business when the girls 
 are tots. No adolescence, no innocence, hence premature 
 puberty falsely confounded with nubility. Hence mad, 
 murderous maternity with premature old age as punish- 
 ment for premature puberty. " Soon ripe, soon rotten " 
 is their proverb that tells the tragedy : to be a " fake- 
 woman " at nine means that she is sure to be a broken- 
 down baby at thirty. She knows everything too early, 
 therefore can learn nothing when it is too late.^ 
 
 You see these tots carrying dolls {chisungwa), but this 
 carved " baby " is a serious sex incentive and not the 
 harmless marionette of civilised childhood. They say that 
 one such doll changed the whole course of local history. 
 Out East a wife of the king's son was bathing in the river, 
 a little girl with her doll intruded and she drowned this 
 girlie because her doll had gone in to the same water as her- 
 self, the implication being that this doll is no mere plaything 
 
 1 Coincidence : Near this very spot Miss Mabel Shaw in later years faced 
 this formidable problem of Africa's young women, her boarding-school at 
 Mbereshi being a true model of its kind. 
 
STILL SOUTHING IT 129 
 
 but has a deep sinister suggestion. Thus the king's son 
 got embroiled in this vendetta and was driven from his 
 father's jurisdiction, for is it not the king who is imfumu or 
 death dealer ? He alone has ex officio right to wield the 
 difumo or spear, both these words being formed from the 
 root fu, death. Therefore, a king alone having the power 
 of death, and the wife of this prince having killed a human 
 being in a flash of ill-temper, the king banned his abetting 
 son from The Presence, calling him NKUVA or Lightning. 
 " Yes," retorted the renegade, " Lightning I am. Lightning 
 I shall ever be \nkuva], so ofi I go to seek my own kingdom." 
 Thus and then began the western exodus to Lake Mweru, 
 the initial pressure being this usurpation of the death 
 penalty. Aiid a mere doll did it all. 
 
 The women around here are a wild lot who band together 
 in a female combination best Anglicised and abbreviated as 
 " Freemasonry." What, then, is the why and wherefore 
 of this mysterious, this incredible woman's movement in 
 far Africa ? The answer is precise for the proofs are com- 
 plete, the motives patent. Polygamy did it all, for poly- 
 gamy, a house divided against itself, cannot stand, hence 
 this resolve of these women to combine against man the 
 monster. For if one man professes to " love " from three 
 to thirty wives, then it is equally certain the said three to 
 thirty out of sheer self-respect profess to hate each other. 
 One man playing with a dozen women, keeping them to- 
 gether as a circus juggler does a dozen golden balls in the 
 air, rising and falling but never touching the grouhd. No 
 wonder these women combine in a club to declare that they 
 are really victims of the man. But what really rescued 
 the club idea from the suggestion of being a mere woman's 
 wrangle was the fact that kings had daughters as well as 
 sons. And these princesses at once added their prestige 
 to this club-protest in favour of their sex. 
 
 Nor did this protest end ia mere pungent " tongue- 
 tactics " (ktdeya mulomo). There is more than this that 
 causes a swift jarring reversal of the ancient notion about 
 woman being the weaker vessel. One famous lady actually 
 took the field of battle against her own husband Kalembwe, 
 Livingstone's friend, and for many a weary day shots were 
 
130 STILL SOUTHING IT 
 
 exchanged between husband and wife, the fighting all 
 taking place down the Lualaba at a place called " God's 
 meal pestles," where this Amazon carried on a fiery 
 fight. The same Madam Kalembwe this, who was a famous 
 polyandrist with the bouncing manners of a barmaid. 
 Chased out of the house by his dear Xantippe, a pail of 
 water following him up as a parting salute, Socrates 
 quaintly opined that thunder often brought rain. But 
 here you have a lady who produced the real thing, the real 
 roar of " Tower " guns with a whizz of bullets directed 
 against her homeless husband. Lombe, too, a bigger chief 
 downstream, expostulated for the last time with his lady 
 and then ran to his elephant gun and shot himself. Suicide 
 caused by domestic bickerings. This the great Lombe, 
 who pioneered potatoes in the land and lived to see them 
 become a staple diet among the Lubans. 
 
 So infectious was this among the woman-kind that the 
 sex lost its customary placidity and one woman at my camp 
 in Butembo, with all the courage of the masculine gender, 
 actually killed a lion with her hoe. Crouching out in the 
 maniocwhere she was working, she found herself attacked in 
 the fields, and splendidly split the skull of Felis leo with her 
 short Luban hoe. Thus your Budindu club has developed 
 a type all of its own, utterly unlike the old impersonal self- 
 efiacing womanhood of the " chattel " genus, and here it 
 is you find the solution of that long-standing puzzle in 
 Africa as to the chief's nephew often usurping the rights of 
 his own sons. The Budindu club it was that exploited the 
 doctrine that true aristocratic succession to the throne was 
 only found on the princess's side, the argument being merely 
 another hard knock at polygamy. " For," said the 
 princess to her royal brother, " you, King, may marry 
 forty wives, but I may only marry one man. Therefore, 
 that one man, being a spick-and-span aristocrat, the cream 
 of earth's son, is, and must be, a blue-blood prince, whereas 
 you, the Chief, can have a son who has a King for his 
 father and a slave for his mother." The luminous logic 
 of all this at once clears up an old difiiculty, the " sister's 
 son " being a blue-blood black. Therefore, and by parity 
 of reasoning, a mere King's son is a nobody. 
 
O " 
 
 o ^ 
 
 Q 
 
 « 
 
STILL SOUTHING IT 131 
 
 But what about my wife all these days, the mysterious 
 " G." in this " D. and G. C." duet ? Hats ofE to the ladies, 
 last at the Cross, first at the tomb ! Africa is so essen- 
 tially a domestic land that its pioneer ladies easily and 
 evidently surpass mere men in their very special sort of 
 service. (Do not dare " Poor ladies ! " them ; their 
 smile of serenity freezes any such adjective on your lips.) 
 But as their service is of a silent sort, this is the reason 
 why I say something in the third person singular that she 
 " would not, could not, should not " tell. With the pass- 
 ing days my wife contrives correspondingly to travel on 
 a modest minimum of baggage. One mysterious box is 
 so cleverly contrived in the art of compression that it 
 serves for all her personal needs. This omnium gatherum 
 contains just the very medicines, very garments, very 
 books ; not to mention many excellent etceteras. 
 
 The traditional Holland woman is so keen on cleanliness 
 that she would either die of shame or die of scrubbing, 
 and so with this pioneer lady and her passion for economy. 
 Yet far from this suggesting a stingy sort of existence, she 
 it is who always has something to spare for somebody else : 
 it is the selfish folk who soon become so small, so mean, so 
 ugly in their parsimoniousness. Was it not from that very 
 box the King of the Belgians got his surprise, here far from 
 the racketing world ? Then it was — presto ! — she dug out 
 from its depths (amid bootlaces, needles, etc.) an incredible 
 little packet of icing sugar. Next, she seems to marshal 
 from nowhere all the orthodox adjuncts of Mrs. Beaton. 
 Then with the light of tenacity and steady purpose shining 
 in her eyes she — all apron and anxiety ! — yes, she it was 
 who " created " for him his own royal cake with his own 
 princely name in pink on top. " Brussels ! " he cried ; 
 " this is not Africa, it is Europe ! " 
 
 It is a great business she has on hand, this disputing with 
 the Devil over the souls of negro women. There is no 
 need of placid nonentities in such a catch-as-catch-can 
 matter. The first white woman who ever breathed their 
 air, verily she pays the price of pioneer popularity, night 
 and day nothing but a relentless negro stare. Out among 
 the villages she is a huge ? mark, one ev^lasting 
 
132 STILL SOUTHING IT 
 
 " why 1 " They look hei^ through as if a human being 
 were only an animal with a toilet. Rumour runs that her 
 wheezy little American organ is a box full of tunes, and the 
 lady has merely to deposit it on the ground when it — 
 squeaks. This is only tentative, however, and the final 
 decision on the music subject is the simple unarguable 
 statement that there is a beast inside that squeals when you 
 trample on its tail, the bass end of the keyboard the place 
 where he howls, and the treble the comer where he squeals. 
 The lady is also rumoured to have locks of hair so long that 
 an easy toilet is performed by twisting the said locks round 
 her toes. It is further fabled that once in olden time the 
 said lady was purchased for two oxen by her husband. It 
 is also on dit that the soap of her ablutions is medicine for 
 the white skin, and that originally in pre-soap ages we were 
 as black as coal. This soap fiction they repeat with a sort 
 of grim hilarity, almost hinting that what soap has done 
 soap can do ! 
 
 The King of the Belgians was amused to hear how one 
 chief paid her a high compliment when he laid it down as 
 a self-evident proposition that the Queen of England was 
 her elder sister who stayed at home housekeeping to admit 
 of her visiting his land ! This inflated chief was a contem- 
 plative, rather stout gentleman of excellent digestion 
 whose local ladies used their pierced noses as a sort of pin- 
 cushion, and any borrowed needle is promptly run through 
 their noses for safety. Fancy a group of these ladies 
 presenting their most sugary compliments and requesting 
 to pinch the lady's nose to verify the declaration that hers 
 is not a nasal pin-cushion ! Now that she has gone ofi, 
 the crowd of women have been taught to take up the needy 
 comers and substitute theirs for her service. 
 
 Long before others, here she is pioneering this Far 
 Interior, the first of her sex. With medical help hundreds 
 of miles away, here it is our first-bom saw the light of God. 
 Here, too, for many a day she faced the coarse native fare 
 and tried for Christ's sake to like what she ate when she 
 could not eat what she liked. And the days when our 
 supply of tea ran out. Our so-called " tea," last meal of 
 the day, is occasionally brightened with a venison steak ; 
 
STILL SOUTHING IT 133 
 
 but at last came the day when she masked the last solemn 
 spoonful : masking it again and yet again, until it was a 
 mere memory — and we sat down to have " tea " without 
 tea. First it weakened ofi to a modest brown, then a faint 
 yellow, then came the pearl tea stage, and the week's 
 end saw no tea at all. The terminal tea was so weak that 
 it had to be imagined. We called it " Best Memory 
 Blend." 
 
 Leading the caravan along his trail, you must think of 
 Majiwara perspiringly thumping the drum as he twisted 
 in and out of the Indian file. The old symbol of war, 
 Livingstone transformed it into the pledge of peace. The 
 African says, " A drum sounds because it is empty," and 
 certainly this drum leading the caravan was as empty as 
 it was innocent of the old bellicose business. In later 
 days many an old devil's drum was consecrated as the call 
 to church or school. They say " dog does not eat dog," 
 but here is one drum out to destroy the other, the drum 
 of peace out to abolish the other old drum of death. 
 
CHAPTEE X 
 FOLLOWING HIM UP 
 
 The reader may be dis'posed to pick 
 and choose, approbate and reprobate 
 the several sections of this letter, un- 
 mindful of the fact that it has been 
 modelled on old Puritan William Perkins, 
 who, beside his name, wrote on all his 
 hooks the motto : " Thou art a minister 
 of the Word, mind thy business." 
 
" A good many months ago I came across a little paragraph in an 
 old newspaper in which it was said there were 38,000 promises in 
 the Bible. . . . Thirty-eight thousand promises in the Bible ? 
 As well say there are 38,000 years in Eternity." 
 
 J. P- Struthers. 
 " Last night I came across two policemen looking at a verse in 
 Mark's Gospel by aid of a lantern.'" 
 
 Idem. 
 " Passed three carters to-day with their horses and carts. Saw 
 one of them with a wee wee book in his hand. After I was four 
 yards ahead I heard him read to his neighbour, ' Verily I say unto 
 you, If any man hear My words.' " 
 
 Idem, 
 
I 
 
 CHAPTEE X 
 FOLLOWING HIM UP 
 
 N a dainty quatrain, Dean Swift long ago wrote the 
 Diary item for to-day : 
 
 " Cartographers in Ajritis maps 
 With savage pictures fill the gaps. 
 And o'er the inhospitable downs. 
 Place elephants instead of toivns," 
 
 TMs rhymes exactly with our experience to-day on the 
 Luapula River. For as there is nothing more plainly 
 disallowed by the facts of life than that a traveller should 
 not lack a good map, we accordingly boasted the largest, 
 loudest and latest. This speculation, however, turned out 
 to be a superlative jest, for the first thing we found was 
 that a dummy township on the Luapula, mapped " Fort 
 Rosebery," did not, never did exist. Yet thanks to the 
 fertile brain of our map-maker and by way of making 
 assurance doubly sure, here is this cartographic gem flour- 
 ished in our faces in large letters, the cruel publicity of 
 the thing being quite painful. The reason ? There is a 
 method in all this madness. Like the cocksure canals in 
 the planet Mars, this arm-chair geography was a gambling 
 with futurity, the hjrpothesis in London being that the 
 British would (some sweet day !) have a walk-over on this 
 Luapula. That Kazembe would climb down from his 
 giddy pinnacle of Mwata. That consequent on his 
 capitulation The Jack would eventually flutter south as 
 far as the Falls. And that finally (in the post-Paulo Future) 
 a fort would be built to redeem this map from mendacity. 
 Meantime, here we are in the region of hard fact, a map 
 of the moon in our hands when plain terrestrial data would 
 be preferable to such lunar locations. The serious old 
 
 137 
 
138 FOLLOWING HIM UP 
 
 postal guide, too, endorsing this non est inventus fable. 
 How much better, because much franker, Dean Swift's 
 old gents who stuck down a modest sprinkling of elephants 
 and birds by way of filling up the gaps in " Afric's Maps." 
 Too often these quaint old cartographers have been laughed 
 at, whereas in this case they could easily retort that at 
 least they traded only in " black elephants of the genuine 
 Luapula sort, and not the K.G.S. " white " ones. 
 
 I regret if such a criticism be too caustic, but this moon- 
 shine in map-making does not easily lend itself to dispas- 
 sionate treatment. Had we been younger in the country, 
 our throats could easily have been cut over just such a 
 false guarantee of protection. We of " the land-ship " 
 must either sink or swim to some glorious port. Eather 
 a discouraging outlook this, perhaps ; but in for a penny in 
 for a pound and we must see this thing through. Besides, 
 does it not give us one more opportunity of proving that, 
 unarmed and almost empty-handed as we are, we can open 
 up countries that are shut to the Government ? Could 
 not the African Tertullian boast as early as the year 209 
 that " even those parts of Britain into which the Eoman 
 arms had never penetrated were become subject to Christ." 
 Deduction : We can never move Africa if we let Africa 
 move us. 
 
 At the time (it is years ago) this innocent expostulation 
 of mine caused the late Mr. Cecil Ehodes to spring into the 
 ring with the roar of an angry tiger. He was nominally 
 responsible, for was he not paying the Foreign Office £10,000 
 a year to occupy provisionally this B.S.A. Co. strip of 
 territory from Zomba ? And was this the hoax-goods he 
 got for his money ? Why should " those Crawfords " risk 
 their necks for a cock-and-bull " Fort Eosebery " non- 
 existent ? Had they been killed, this mendacious map 
 would have been to blame. Yes ; rivers are mapped with 
 
 a hj^othetical flow thus , but towns are only 
 
 put down cartographically when they exist on solid plough- 
 able earth. No wonder he soon sent up Major Forbes to 
 make a B.S.A. Co. beginning for themselves : this map- 
 muddle forced his hands. 
 
 'Tis passing strange. The Foreign Office, I regret to say. 
 
FOLLOWING HIM UP 139 
 
 has treated Livingstone's dispatches to Lord Clarendon in 
 its usual polite, indifferent way. Here in Kazembe's 
 territory he it was who saw the great pabn-oil tree growing 
 to perfection ; saw down the years how this could mean, 
 should mean, millions of pounds in potential oil exports ; 
 saw that the diluvial soil on the east bank of the Luapula 
 was the very sort, very shade for a great palm-oil industry. 
 And so seeing he shouted jubilee to deaf departmental ears 
 — I mean, this God-send of palm oil to an otherwise barren 
 territory. Yet such is the perversity of circumstances, 
 despite (perhaps because of) this plain project of his for 
 commercial development, the home authorities treated it to 
 the usual languid indifference and well-bred contempt. 
 Discover a new species of antelope, an Okapi or the like, 
 and all the clubs are agog. But come down to brass tacks, 
 talk development, especially the local development that 
 gives the native a chance to foster home life, and it leaves 
 your " big-game " hunter cold. London never cared much 
 for God-fearing, cheese-paring Scotchmen, and so Living- 
 stone's advice remains for some of the " broken brigade " 
 to come along and scoop in a surprise. 
 
 Seeing that the Imperial Government agreed to govern 
 these territories by proxy, by charter, one often regrets 
 that the African Lakes Company did not get this N.E.R. 
 Glasgow would have done better than London : most young 
 A.L.C. fellows are better than their Managers, solid and 
 keen with no taint of " old chappie " sniff about them. Do 
 not misunderstand me : a good sort, very good sort are 
 these " Chartered " fellows, but most superciliously anxious 
 to inform you that " trade " is one million miles removed 
 from their temperament. Thus it is, from Codrington down 
 to the latest N.C., the whole type of official, while thoroughly 
 and obtusely manly, is almost disgracefully ignorant of 
 economics. These are no lands for red-tape or red noses. 
 The solution will be, ought to be, in Rhodesia entering the 
 South African Union : then you will have a real Afrikander 
 type, keen on farming and conserving local labour. Not 
 the decent young " Chartered " fellow whose only use for 
 Cape Town is as a gangway en route to London. This is 
 no mere persiflage. Northern Rhodesia's financial year 
 
140 FOLLOWING HIM UP 
 
 ending March 31, 1920, is a disgrace. Year after year the 
 disproportion between revenue and expenditure has 
 developed to such a derogatory degree that here you have 
 a £130,371 lis. 4d. deficit, even after pouring out thousands 
 of natives into the Congo mines in order that they might 
 get tax-money. 
 
 Take them all, gold mines, copper mines, cinemas and 
 what not, " great art and invention is begotten for a 
 worthy purpose, but sooner or later certain perverted men, 
 who prefer what is profitable to what is proper, debase the 
 art or invention, and prey upon the weakness of human 
 nature to its ■undoing. Then arises the need for the re- 
 straining power of the State. The need of such restraint 
 is an acknowledgment of human weakness, but the time 
 has come when we must invoke the power of the State to 
 save our African youth." 
 
 It is the same sick old story. In after-years N.E. 
 Rhodesia paid bitterly for this neglect of Livingstone's 
 advice. Having no internal resources, nearly all the able- 
 bodied men were drafted across to the Belgian Katanga 
 mines, with the usual break-up of home life and resultant 
 degeneration of tribal stamina owing to promiscuity. 
 Yet all the while this diluvial palm soil of the Luapula's 
 right bank was, is to-day, shouting out a million pounds 
 investment, the proof being Mr. Bernard Turner's great 
 L.M.S. results in these same palms at Mbereshi. At 
 Mbereshi, ma foi, almost the very spot where Livingstone 
 wrote the despised report. The very latest facts farther 
 south force my hand in this matter of the expatriation of 
 natives. Dr. R. A. Keith Eraser, Medical Inspector for 
 Venereal Diseases for the Union, in his recent lecture 
 wondered why the treatment of syphilis among natives 
 as a vital business proposition had not yet appealed to the 
 big labour magnates of this country. Syphilis was steadily 
 depleting the labour market of South Africa, and with such 
 rapidity and certainty, that in twenty years it would, if 
 not stemmed, render coloured labour so rare that only the 
 very wealthy would be able to pay for it. He dealt with 
 the unnatural lives of the 300,000 natives on the Rand 
 through the absence of their wives, and said it was up to 
 
FOLLOWING HIM UP 141 
 
 tte Chamber of Mines to reorganise the living conditions 
 of the Ltidustrial native, so that he might bring his wife 
 and family, and be able to lead a domestic life on the 
 mines. He ofiered this solution to the industrial 
 authorities, as the Chamber of Mines was of opinion that 
 such a gigantic scheme was impracticable. An alternative 
 policy would be short-service contracts for the native, 
 rigid medical examinations on arrival and departure and 
 exhaustive treatment for such as became infected. Women 
 admitted on the industrial areas would, he said, have to 
 be rigidly dealt with. 
 
 But to revert to these oil palms. Lubaland is the true 
 because literal Phoenicia, and the farther down river you go, 
 the palm proudly lords it over the natives. The tribal 
 life revolves round their great Mukoma ; food, drink, 
 clothing and oil all welling out of it. (Watch this word for 
 palm, Mukoma : why should it mean " victor " ? Who 
 told these cannibals that a palm was the symbol of Victory?) 
 Certes, had these Lubans a flag it would be woven out of 
 palm cloth and tied to a palm-rib for a flag pole, while 
 centering the said flag would be a proud palm as national 
 emblem. The very flag-bearer would probably perpetuate 
 the palm idea, for would he not be a man who had dined on 
 roast pahnnuts, washing down the same with their favourite 
 inebriant, pahn wine ? Would not his body, moreover, be 
 smeared with palm oil shining like varnish, and would not 
 his only covering be a kilt of palm cloth ? Thus with palms 
 in his land he soon gets palms on his brain, and any par- 
 ticularly rich comer of Lubaland boasting more palms than 
 usual is a regular cock-pit. Do not the Lubans say : " A 
 fruitful land will be also fruitful in war " ? 
 
 Thus the poor palm, at once their boast and their re- 
 proach, seems doomed as an emblem of victory. That pahn 
 toddy of theirs has also cracked many a Luban's skull in 
 a double sense ; beginning as a harmless lemonade, it 
 ultimately gets as bad as brandy — the " strife-stirrer," 
 they call it. This name is very pat because eloquent of 
 the wild rows resulting from a palm-toddy carouse, each 
 one of the black drunks beginning right ofE to rake up the 
 mud-heaps of memory for a casus belli. 
 
142 FOLLOWING HIM UP 
 
 No wonder the really great Luban King Mukenge tackled 
 the problem like a giant and ordered the deforestation of 
 miles of these profuse palms ; prohibition in this case being 
 equivalent to the terrible English analogy of destroying 
 all farmers' grain lest it should be sold to breweries or 
 distilleries ! Yet hundreds of white men have libelled the 
 negro race by declaring that the black man will never 
 quarrel with his bread-and-butter. The best thing about 
 this anti-alcohol crusade is the backing it gets from the 
 Luba language, 'perda being primarily the verb " to 
 poison," hence, " to be drunk " : a man drunk is poisoned, 
 they say. Akin to tobacco being called " the killer " 
 (Fwaka), this is only one of many instances of their own 
 language rising in revolt to convict them. So much, 
 indeed, comes out of this wonderful tree, food, fibre, drink, 
 dress, that they crown all their other compliments by calling 
 it Kiti cha Mweo, or the Tree of Life. So here you have 
 their own language laughing at their folly and getting death 
 out of their " tree of life." This rebuke from their own 
 dictionary, moreover, is seconded by the palm's own whim 
 — it dies when they tap it for toddy. So palm-brandy is 
 a national robber, for if a man must have his drink, he 
 thereby dooms himself to a slow starvation. Is it not the 
 tree of life, and yet he dares to sap the life of the land 
 by killing the great central asset of Lubaland ? This was 
 the mighty Mukenge's argument when he felled all his 
 national palms ; said he : " You will kill them in any event 
 for your brandy, but you will also kill your own brethren 
 in carousal. Therefore in cutting down the Mikoma I 
 am at least saving human life." A dumb palm preaching 
 a sermon : if ever trees clapped their hands those Luban 
 pahns surely saluted such a kingly deed. There was no 
 House of Lords to reject his Licensing Bill. Listen to 
 Mukenge's logic (loquitur) : What makes drunkards ? 
 The palm. Who grows the palm ? My Lubans. Where 
 grows the palm ? On my land. Who owns both Luban 
 and palm ? The King thereof. Who is the King ? I 
 am the King ; and I doom thee, Palm, to defores- 
 tation ! 
 Take this tale of turpitude. Here is a feUow such a slave 
 
'I'lfK ^"()^^■(; <'()X(;ii ix j.iualaxji. 
 
 .Miliioiis of -all.iri~ r,f ],,,t tlcwin- l.ul ll\in«- iMilrr. 
 
 UL'] 
 
FOLLOWING HIM UP 143 
 
 to beer that this fluid diet has unmanned him into a flabby 
 mass of smiling incompetence. Which means, most 
 meaningly, that he and all his brand of boozers are the 
 first to die when an epidemic comes along. Over they go, 
 big huUdng soakers, the very first to fall on infection 
 entering a tribe : they burned ofi their reserve ammunition 
 ia boozing and here comes along pneumonia to find his 
 puffy body an easy prey. For hina the whole world seems 
 to contract into this wild cordial, a thing he slyly suggests 
 every time he lifts the beer gourd. With quivering nostrils 
 well iato the tipple, the circumference of the big beer-bowl 
 becomes to him the horizon of the universe. Here in these 
 two-in-one horizons (if the old toper would only see it), 
 here is a complete commentary on his life, this beer the 
 beginning, middle and end of all earthy measure and 
 treasure. 
 
 We had a great Prohibition meeting in our town, 
 and swept beer out with a bang. The old Jewish saying 
 was, " Where Satan cannot go in person he sends wine," 
 but here in Africa the Devil runs the beer business in 
 person, not by proxy. " Drink beer, think beer," is their 
 rule, and the whole catalogue of crime can be traced to a 
 big beer-brew. No sooner does this Devil's drink get into 
 the man than it proves possession by kicking the man out 
 who took it in. It is a curious concession to make, but 
 the tragedy of Africa is that it never had a bottle, and this 
 lack of the cork in a bottle gives them the wholesale de- 
 bauchery that woidd be reduced to retail by the more 
 limited receptacle. My point is not an extenuation, 
 but an explanation. Their process of brewing, I mean, 
 is the complicated business of a week, when it culminates 
 in an angry tell-tale froth : the beer is now technically 
 " ripe " ipia), and unless aU the inebriating contents of 
 these big jars are swilled off on that very day, then the next 
 day sees the same drink degenerate into pig-wash. The 
 non est bottle would have mitigated matters, for this 
 brewing being a big business, they only tackle a big 
 supply at a time. The week of preliminaries climaxes in 
 a brutal beer that only keeps the head on it for one 
 fleeting day, hence one mad concentrated debauchery. 
 
144 FOLLOWING HIM UP 
 
 The greatest asset of a tribe is its number of clever 
 women-brewers, and the more heady the brew the more 
 hearty the tribal thanks. Now, there is a moan all 
 over because many of these strong-drink specialists are 
 being converted. The outsiders think they have lost their 
 reason, whereas on the contrary we have given them four 
 good reasons beside their own old reason they never lost : 
 (1) their head is clearer ; (2) health better ; (3) heart 
 lighter ; (4) purse heavier. 
 
 True for you. Dr. Livingstone, there is room for a mis- 
 sionary, for read this. Here is a chief who detests for- 
 eigners, and is so sure about it that he sharpened all his 
 anti-European ideas to a point and drove them home in 
 a sort of " Yellow Peril " lecture. But he has no sooner 
 used this word " foreigner " than he contradicts himself by 
 saying, " I hate all foreigners except one, and he is so 
 foreign to our land that we wUl all welcome him to heart 
 and home if he will only come along." " Whom do you 
 mean ? " I asked, wondering at this marvel. " Ah," he 
 said, " his name is Mr. Satisfaction [Chikuta] — our fellow- 
 townsman is Mr. Craving and he never leaves me ; hut should 
 Mr. Satisfaction come along, oh ! " I turned sharp on the 
 Chief and got an arrow in between the joints of his African 
 agnostic armour. " Look you," said I, " he is here in my 
 heart, the Mr. Satisfaction you name ; we call Him the 
 Lord of Glory." Christ is " the desire of all nations," 
 and here you have the oldest longing of the sons of men. 
 The mad old myths of Greece are tell-tale in this longing 
 of the aching void : Sisyphus always pushing the stone 
 uphill and the stone always rolling back again. Pro- 
 metheus, with the vulture always and awfully gnawing 
 at his vitals. Tantalus seeking, ever seeking, the water 
 that ever eludes him. A proof all this, written across the 
 international sky, that if the Soul of Man were of earth 
 then earth would satisfy it. Eeflection: the thirst for 
 the infinite proves the infinite. 
 
 Many of our trials, though, are only a morbid way of 
 looking at our privileges : is not all this vision of sin and 
 sorrow only God asking us to look at the hole of the pit 
 from whence we were nationally dug ? We read out to 
 
FOLLOWING HIM UP 145 
 
 the camp from a Pauline Epistle this morning, yet who were 
 the reputed cannibals of Paul's day if not our own kith 
 and km ? St. Jerome is a good enough witness on this 
 human-beef business : " When I was a boy in Gaul," says 
 he, " I beheld the Scots, a people living in Britain, eating 
 htmian flesh ; and although there were plenty of cattle 
 and sheep at their disposal, yet they would prefer a ham 
 of the herdsman or a slice of female breast." So Solomon 
 was right after all : " The thing that hath been," said 
 he, " it is that which shall be : and there is no new thing 
 under the sun." Even the Jews, who rightly claim to be 
 the world's aristocrats, even they were told by their own 
 Amos they were no better than " niggers." " For are ye 
 not," asks Amos, " are ye not as the children of the 
 Ethiopians unto me, children of Israel ? saith the Lord." 
 No better than the blacks. 
 
 En fassant, we came on an African cairn (mfinga), each 
 traveller throwing his stone on the heap as he moves on. 
 The curious (shall I say contemptible ?) cause of this ever- 
 increasiag heap is a fall, the fall of some previous traveller 
 who came a cropper on the slippery path. Hence this cairn 
 of contempt, literally " stones of stumbling," thrown as 
 a taunt on the great and growing heap. Why should 
 a two-legged man fall ? Why become a baby again grovel- 
 ling on the ground ? All this the jeering cairn says to 
 passers-by, and the hint has in it the double dig of a double 
 fall, material and moral. Thus do they trmnpet abroad 
 their African self-righteousness, casting a stone with gusto 
 at the contretemps of their feUow who fell. That cairn 
 for the " down dog " is a continental symbol of the negro 
 custom of swooping down on any unfortunate and glorying 
 against him. Never a thought that thereby they are 
 cutting down the bridge they themselves will wish to cross 
 one dark day, their day of visitation. 
 
 A little later, down goes the sun like a ball of fire and 
 this last hour of the day seems to concentrate all the 
 pleasures of the past. It is like the African evening sky, 
 full of farewell rays all the rosier because they are the last. 
 Then comes the evening altar in the woods. This is a great 
 meeting with which we wind up the hard day, and if the 
 10 
 
146 FOLLOWING HIM UP 
 
 sun made his exit gloriously, we, too, have as fine a finish. 
 Now it is the pilgrimage culminates in its happiest moments. 
 All of us, men every inch of us, look into each other's eyes 
 and talk of Eternity. None of the nonchalance of the 
 professional preacher about this bit of business. 
 
CHAPTER XI 
 ON THE ZIGZAG TRAIL 
 
 In all the literature of baffled 
 hopeless endeavour, there is no case so 
 contradictory as this of Livingstone's, 
 where all ill is well, all bad good, and 
 the very worst the very best. 
 
" Worth makes the man, and want of it the fellow, 
 The rest is all but leather or prunella." 
 
 " What profits it to understand 
 The merits of a spotless shirt, 
 A dapper foot, a little hand. 
 If half the little soul be dirt ? " 
 
 " No man treats Jesus Christ well who treats his brother wrong." 
 
CHAPTER XI 
 ON THE ZIGZAG TRAIL 
 
 WITH perspiration beading the brow, we pass town 
 after town encircled by its own loopholed 
 stockade and higli rampart thrown up from the 
 ditch. A sort of portcullis gate bangs down at sunset 
 and there they are cooped up for the night, safe from pre- 
 datory attacks. A tell-tale skull, here and there, is stuck 
 up on the stockade. This bleaching syrabol smiles sourly, 
 as both threat and consolation, according to the differently 
 disposed natives. Here, then, is a picket-fence hamlet 
 sometimes more prominent on the map than on the planet 
 earth. Yet no matter how small, having an encircling 
 wall of wood is it not literally " a city " in the initial mean- 
 ing of the word ? Thus starting with such a " stockade " 
 = " city " analogy, you soon see many other verbal 
 babies born of this etymological union. It is a matter, too, 
 not of twins, but triplets, for " civility," " politeness " 
 and " urbanity " are all three easily from dvis, poUs, urbs = 
 a city. The picture is that of the coarse country bumpkin 
 versus the five-fold polished, polite, civil, urbane city dweller, 
 with (same root !) the policeman at hand, all five forms being 
 from civis, a city = a fence. Here it is, then, you see this 
 word-growth begin inside a tightly packed African town, 
 with so little elbow room for the co-occupants that there 
 is need, much need, for mutual forbearance = civility = 
 a city = the fence that hems them in. This encircling 
 stockade has started the whole code of courtesy, just as the 
 first city (= civility) only meant a similar stockade. 
 
 It was the first murderer who built the first city : his 
 offence made him build a fence for defence. In England, 
 by curious contrast, a cathedral creates a city, but the 
 first Bible city was created by the first murder. And 
 
 149 
 
150 ON THE ZIGZAG TRAIL 
 
 the last city ? There is " no temple therein," " nor death." 
 Yet is it the city because there is so much real civility 
 therein. Country folk have any amount of space to sprawl 
 over, but the city man is forced to adapt himself to " the 
 code of crush," hence urbanity from urbs, a city, and a 
 respecting of the other fellow in the common crush of the 
 city. In other words, it is all as amusing as this : civilian 
 and civility being derived from civis, a city, which derives 
 from a fence, lo, the civilian doubles the business by wearing 
 his stand-offish civility around him the same way a city 
 wears its wall of defence. This is the reason why even 
 " policeman " is only another form for " politeness " : 
 strutting up and down among his civilians, the policeman 
 is the man to teach the rabble " politeness," or city manners, 
 from folis, a city. 
 
 It is not for nothing nor yet for mere verbiage that they 
 fix on this stockade idea as constituting a " city," Before 
 ever a hut makes its appearance inside, all the foundation 
 ceremonies circle round the fence as defence from wild man, 
 .wild beast. Rarely (or more correctly never) do they begin 
 a new town without a flourish of religion in the face of the 
 unseen world. The native priest sees to it all : (1) an 
 oblation of fine flour on the new site of their choice ; (2) 
 a prayer to the spirits of the land ; (3) a Gideon-like 
 challenge that if the white flour be found unpolluted on the 
 morrow then this bodes well for the new abode. Then (4) 
 with rejoicing the priest leads ofE by cutting the first stake 
 for the stockade ; further (5) he smears the same with a 
 decoction from his " horn of salvation " ; next (6) the king 
 and queen hold fast to this stake of their wooden wall until 
 it is rammed home into the soil. Then the whole town soon 
 finishes the circular stockade, the last phase after the last 
 stake being a sort of doxology to the spirits when priest, 
 king and queen stand by this last stake that closes the last 
 gap singing, " ye spirits, may our fence [or " city "] 
 never fall, for ye are the defenders thereof ! " " Reli- 
 gion," no doubt, but one is endlessly reminded by their 
 post-ceremonial antics that (what could you expect ?) 
 a stream can rise no higher than its source. 
 I tell them almost too incessantly that the Livingstone 
 
THE PIONEER ROUTE OF MR. AND MRS. CRAWFORD. 
 South through Kazembe and Mleremlere to the grave of LlTingstone's heart. 
 
 150] 
 
ON THE ZIGZAG TRAIL 151 
 
 way is the best, the foundation everything. God builds 
 from the top downwards, " Behold, I lay in Zion a founda- 
 tion." So in all this " city " building of theirs it is either 
 the Babel way or the Zion way, for there is none other. 
 Babel builds a tower to reach up from earth to heaven, and 
 John saw Zion coming down from heaven to earth. These 
 rival methods indicate rival results, the flesh lusteth against 
 the Spirit and the Spirit lusteth against the flesh. Babel 
 starts from earth and ends where it began : Zion begins 
 from above and descends from above to wean us from earth 
 to heaven. This is St. Augustiae's point in the famous 
 words, " Two loves have made two cities : the love of self 
 reaching on to the contempt of God has made the city 
 of the world ; the love of God reaching unto the contempt 
 of self has made the heavenly city." 
 
 Beyond these half-way house spirits, remember, there is 
 the one and only God, LEZA. In this matter of true 
 African belief in Deity (a belief as indelible as death) tra- 
 veller-critics have got to learn that a little bit of grammar 
 goes a long way. African syntax is rigid and ruthless in 
 character, and many a long debate is cut short by one blunt 
 rule of Bantu speech. Take, for example, this God-title 
 in the light of the tough old anti-Mission jibe that this 
 " Leza " Livingstone claimed (and claimed convincingly) 
 means " God," may after all merely amount to place not 
 person, merely a sort of " happy hunting-grounds " of the 
 Red Indians, not a personal God. Our retort is almost 
 ruthless in ef&ciency. A cast-iron law of African sjmtax 
 kiUs this place-not-person idea : KWA can only and always 
 govern person, therefore KWA LEZA, i.e. where God 
 (the person) is. KV for place, KWA for person, such is 
 the Medo-Persic law. Livingstone went KtJ (to the place) 
 Buckingham Palace, but also KWA (to the person) Queen 
 Victoria. It is all clean cut, all crushingly certain, yet 
 more than a dozen non-linguist travellers have tried to 
 pooh-pooh this indelible African belief in God. Living- 
 stone was right, for although his bias was all that way, 
 yet when brains back bias then look out for brain 
 storms. 
 
 But greater and grander link is the root-name for God. 
 
152 ON THE ZIGZAG TRAIL 
 
 Here this subject that " spell-bound " Livingstone before 
 his death ends on the crescendo, I mean, not merely 
 that these natives have the genuine idea of God, but that 
 they have the identical name Moses used, LE the root for 
 Deity (as in LEza) is found all over, and what is LE but 
 the wrong-way round spelling of Semitic EL ? This mere 
 transposing of the vowel is only our old Saxon way of 
 spelUng " thrid " for " third," or " brid " for " bird," or 
 " brent " for " burnt," and so on, following Max Miiller's 
 law of transposition of vowels.' But this is not nearly all. 
 Beginning thus Asdth the same Deity root LE = El, your 
 gusto becomes keen when you see that (1) as in Hebrew, 
 so here, both these roots mean doubly, " to be " and " to 
 be strong." Also (2) that as Hommel traces back EL to 
 its minimum form " I," even so here you have eight 
 languages spelling it LE or LI, as against seven with this 
 self-same " I " of Hommel. And, remember, aU these 
 right through Africa claim most stoutly the substantive 
 verb as their meaning (1) to be, then (2) by emphasis, to 
 be strong. The double idea being obvious that if God is, 
 then He is in no mere mediocre sense, hence " to be strong." 
 Thus Gesenius, Hommel and Davidson all combine to 
 certify this thrilling proof. 
 
 I know that to be brazenly dogmatic on this El discovery 
 will only react prej udicially on my philologic position. But 
 stripped of all disguises and evasions I would pin myself 
 down to the following seven facts : 
 
 ETHNOLOGY.— I. The great incursions of Negroids 
 from Arabia down into Central Africa. 
 
 II. The later flood of the Hamitic branch pouring south 
 to Bantuise the Continent north and south of the Equator. 
 
 ^ A glance at any book on Philology will sustain this transposition of vowels. 
 For instance. Max Miiller, Lectures on Science of Language, vol. i, p. 294 : 
 " The root ar, which root again was originally EI or IE." Again, Farrar, 
 page 135, Language and Languages, says, " The root MA (or AM) which is 
 the same thing." Farrar again (i, 35, 5) proceeds : " The mode of attachment 
 is different. In Aryan if E represents the root and S the inflection, the words 
 are according to the formula ES, whereas in Semitic they are generally SE. 
 Again, Isaac Taylor, Origin of the Aryans, page 294 : " Finnic ablative to 
 corresponds to Aryan ablative at." Mere random quotations these, but 
 sufficient to prove such an initial fact in Comparative Philology as this 
 transposition of vowels. 
 
ON THE ZIGZAG TRAIL 163 
 
 III, The certainty that these early emigrants came south, 
 with their " primitive Shemitic speech," or to be more 
 definite " particularly Southern Arabic " — watch these 
 inverted commas, please ; they will occur anon. 
 
 PHILOLOGY.— Turniag to Dr. A. B. Davidson's 
 famous article " GOD " in " Hastings," I fasten on his data 
 for this " EL " title. 
 
 I. The name EL is " the most widely distributed " of 
 all names for Deity. 
 
 II. Not only is it used in Babylonian, Aramaean, Phoe- 
 nician, Hebrew, but also in Arabic, " particularly Southern 
 Arabic." 
 
 HI. It is thus " primitive Shemitic speech " before it 
 became modified into dialects. 
 
 IV. All this naturally so, for as EL = LE denotes 
 " being," and as this is the first phase of all thought, the 
 initial intuition of all lands, then why be surprised at the 
 same root in Africa seeing it was cradled in the same 
 Arabia ? 
 
 Thus we work out at a very sane Q.E.D. For while the 
 Ethnological phase shows us Africa being peopled by 
 those hordes pouring down from Arabia with their " primi- 
 tive Shemitic speech," here you have endorsive Philology 
 fixing " particularly Southern Arabia " as the linguistic 
 home of EL = LE = I, God. 
 
 As we pick our wondering way south, the inevitable 
 thought comes of Giraud, the young Frenchman, running 
 north for his life along this very trail, with bleeding feet. 
 Imprisoned by Mieremiere, his whale-boat in five sections 
 (stolen for bullets) was captured, but midnight saw him 
 escape towards the north where his caravan awaited him 
 at Kazembe's. Armed to the teeth he left Zanzibar with 
 121 men, 20 porters carryiag the 25-feet-long boat. Four 
 months passed before he reached Lake Nyasa, then he cuts 
 across to Bembaland. July saw him on Lake Bangweulu, 
 and farther on the plunder began at Kalambo's. Then 
 fifteen days later Mieremiere got him and the boat. This 
 flight of Giraud's, marked with great precipitancy, has 
 spoiled matters for us who are next in chronological se- 
 quence. {He failed to reach Livingstone's grave, though !) 
 
154 ON THE ZIGZAG TRAIL 
 
 The tribesmen are all at " half cock," and banking on the 
 certainty that the first whites to emerge from the forest 
 will be his avengers, perhaps those very fighting men now 
 hammering at Kazembe's gates. But lo, the mountain 
 produces but a mouse, and here come " D. and G. C," a 
 mere male and female mouse, no avengers, but a 
 couple of fools of the Livingstone cult. Yes, fools is the 
 unwise word. Bwaume (manliness !) is their swagger word 
 around here. The idea being a magnifico with swash- 
 buckling strut, and if possible the index finger curved 
 round the trigger of a persuasive six-shooter. Yet young 
 hot-blooded Victor Giraud (setat 23) had so many arms 
 that they tricked him into intertribal trouble ! And here 
 are we with walking-sticks moving along to meet that same 
 Son of Belial, Mieremiere. Arms ? Yes, two per person, 
 five fingers on each. 
 
 This is how they do things between Cancer and Capri- 
 corn. Marriage is the great " game " here, and an " eli- 
 gible " swoops up to the door of his " future's " hut, 
 brandishes bow and arrows, yelling out the hundreds-of- 
 y ears- old formula, " My game of the chase, where is it ? " 
 Then peering in, he aims at a bull's-eye mark in a clay 
 image, a miss or hit being greeted with ho ! ho ! or eya ! 
 derision or congratulation, as the case may be. Next day 
 comes the shaving, bathing and anointing ; then the muster 
 in front of the hut, the girl sitting with bows and arrows 
 across her knees, a nasty notification that death is the 
 doom of infidelity. Then comes the long antiphonal 
 Marriage Song. 
 
 1. thou Nightjar {Kambasa), preen thy plumes ; the winter is ended and 
 spring begins. 
 
 2. The little Mulea has found her husband ; shake thy plumes for joy. 
 
 3. Let us, too, dance, though we be strangers, since they have wakened us 
 for the wedding. 
 
 4. The huge roan antelope in the thicket hard by hears our song and awakes. 
 
 5. The Sibwinga, my bridegroom, is waiting at the cross-roads to bring me 
 a bracelet. 
 
 6. I see his beard : let us escape. He is like a lion, and will devour me. 
 
 7. The form of my betrothed is as supple as the taut hot ; take him not from 
 me, ye passers-by. 
 
 8. He is as swift as the mpombo and as agile as the gazelle, or like a little 
 zebra gambolling before its mother. 
 
 9. The bride is no longer a child ; respect her, therefore. 
 
ON THE ZIGZAG TRAIL 155 
 
 10. She is like the stem of the nut tree, bending almost to the ground. 
 
 11. No longer does the bride weep, for she is stout-hearted. 
 
 12. Come, little mother — let us go bathe, and turn ourselves into crocodiles. 
 
 13. I do not want to marry another : I love my husband. 
 
 14. My betrothed, who could find only an old crone to marry him, is not like 
 his friend. 
 
 15. Let not the Sibwinga stumble when carrying bow, lest ill-luck come upon 
 him. 
 
 16. The fish-eagle gnaws his bones in solitude, pining for want of a mate. 
 
 17. In our village there are no barren women — saving only my gluttonous aunt, 
 who eats the beans and the stalks as well. 
 
 18. In vain does the village sorceress point at me the finger of ill-omen, so 
 that I may bear no children. 
 
 19. If the bride has jealous rivals, let us seize them and break their heads 
 against the grindstones, so that they may die of shame and sink beneath 
 the earth. 
 
 20. Every day the bride will sweep out the house, and, setting all in order, take 
 victuals from the grain-bins that are full to overflowing. 
 
 21. Young man, prepare thyself — to-morrow thou goest to the fire. (Re- 
 ferring to the arduous bwinga [marriage] ceremonies.) ^ 
 
 But polygamy spoils it all. Paul has been badly 
 handled by the Critics on the score of bad grammar. Has 
 been made a quibbler in that old polygamic phrase sound- 
 ing across Africa, " Not unto seeds, as of many, but unto 
 thy seed." Eeally here it is you almost defy a monogamic 
 professor in Oxford to see the good sense in this " bad " 
 syntax. One of them commenting upon this " Unto seeds, 
 as of many, hvt as of one " in Galatians, characterises this 
 as " hair-splitting " on the Apostle's part ; " it shows traces 
 of his Rabbinical training," he says, and questions whether 
 the verse has " ever been intelligible to any man." Now 
 here it is polygamic Africa can teach monogamic England : 
 here Sarah, the " Moari," and Hagar, the concubine, 
 {mwilombe) is the daUy story. The very plexure of the 
 ramification of polygamic kinship compels them to tie 
 down the rights of succession to one son ; so that this very 
 sentence " not unto seeds, as of many, but as of one " is a 
 trite bit of African chatter all the year round stereotyped 
 in the language. Out of ten or twenty brave, well-oiled 
 polygamic boys the choice either at birth or in youth is 
 made of one, and the remaining nine or nineteen are utterly 
 ignored, for not " unto seeds as of many " is their Prince 
 of Wales-ship due, but as of one. Of course, the status 
 
 ^ This is a clever Frenchman's translation which I copy. 
 
156 ON THE ZIGZAG TRAIL 
 
 of the mother generally determines the choice. Yes, both 
 in Galatians and here, there is a riot of grammar to obviate 
 the other riot of princelings : they are all " the seed " 
 royal, yet administrative unity demands that one " seed " 
 far excellence sweeps away the plurality of " seeds," that 
 have " no glory by reason of the glory that excelleth." 
 
 Aback of all this tribal blood-letting surely there is some 
 silent reason seducing these tribes into the signing their 
 own death-edict of annihilation ? Why does the Arab 
 find it possible to play the match to the African mine, and 
 why must the local negro aid and abet at his own tribal 
 explosion ? Are they not the common stufi of which the 
 world is made ? And here even among nobodies, is not 
 the earth green and the sky blue ? Answer (and in italics, 
 please, Mr, Printer) : Polygamy is the root cause of the whole 
 turmoil. Here we bring in a true bill, the Lubans in their 
 thousands witnessing against themselves : down-river 
 all the storm-centres of civil war are around the Kingships 
 of Kayumba, Kahongo, Mulongo, Kalamata, Chiyombo, 
 etc., and each of these Kings boasts, at least, forty wives 
 per throne. Sequel : each throne has at least twenty 
 royal rival sons, all plajdng the ancient game of Cain and 
 Abel, all equally infatuated with the craze for succession. 
 ContemplatiQg that vision of inter-fraternal jealousy, it 
 might have been in and of Lubaland that Socrates uttered 
 the corrosive words : Envy is the filthy slime of the soul. 
 Which leads me to explain that each rival wife poisons the 
 mind of the swarms of young nursery princes, every baby 
 boy drinking in this lethal doctrine of civil war with his 
 mother's milk. " Luana Iwa nyeke Iwa Valuva " is the 
 well-known proverb for all this : The eternal warfare of the 
 Luba people — " eternal " because polygamy is eternal, 
 and " warfare " because a throne is at stake. 
 
 " Whose is it ? " shouts one hot-brained black to another, 
 pointing, as he shouts, to the veins of blood in his right 
 arm. " It is not his own blood [i.e. the King's] and did I ash 
 him to give me of his own right royal blood in my veins ? " 
 Just here, then, in these deadly notions of " prince pres- 
 tige," you have the guarantee of unbroken strife, for by this 
 very flourish of spear is he not demonstrating how fit 
 
ON THE ZIGZAG TRAIL 157 
 
 a cut-throat King he, the aspirant, would be? Did he 
 not begin life just thus ? When a mere baby, did they 
 not applaud him when he gave his own Queen-mamma a 
 stinging smack in the face 1 That very smacked mother, 
 too, did she not in very joy turn to him the other cheek 
 also ? " What a j&ne warrior he will make ! " is the vaiil 
 maternal commendation bestowed on that young dog who 
 dared to bite the hand that fed him. So back we swing 
 to the cast-iron formula, " Not unto seeds, as of many . . ." 
 
 Yes, polygamy does spoil it all. Quizzing them on this 
 problem you find it is often the women who want it for 
 domestic economy reasons. Is not the man an eat-all who 
 must dine with a few invited guests at each meal 1 So Mrs. 
 No. 1, with a woman's fatal quickness, sees she would need 
 to slave it to keep the pot going, hence her solution in advis- 
 ing him to marry even a second and third wife ; the more 
 women, the less work for one. In fine, according to this 
 Luban liar, only two good women are known in palm-land, 
 one dead, the other unborn. We chanced on one such 
 marriage to-day, the bridegroom marrying his Number 
 Eleventh. Instead of being ashamed he looked as con- 
 ceited as the famous cock that thought the sun had risen 
 to hear him crow. There was a wealth of beer and mush 
 for aU-comers, the sort of cake and cards of Lubaland ; 
 no ring, and what shoiild be the incredible substitute but 
 a cupid's dart — ^the Luban arrow being the sacred symbol 
 of marriage 1 When this dart is proffered and accepted, 
 then the maiden becomes a matron, tied as tight as an 
 Archbishop can make them. 
 
 Then they danced like demons for a night and day, the 
 stream of changing partners in this wedding-dance being 
 quite typical of the negro wedding itself, marriage a mere 
 matrimonial dance with constant change of partners. 
 Instead of a garland of orange blossoms, they deserve their 
 appropriate bunch of nettles, " bridal " being spelt 
 " bridle." Of course, this much-married Africa has to 
 pay for all this, the result being daily, disgusting divorce. 
 In one village I found all the women had worked almost 
 right round the town in wedlock, changing wife being sure 
 of changing husband. But it gets worse than that, and 
 
158 ON THE ZIGZAG TRAIL 
 
 oftener the woman who has tried marriage half a dozen 
 times, throws the idea up and lives on the loose. Like she 
 of Samaria, " thou hast had five husbands, and now {with 
 brow of brass) he whom thou hast is not thy husband." 
 
 The approaching wet season has a way of forcing sharp 
 decisions and unless we hurry we shall be meteorologically 
 murdered. Yet chief after chief bars the trail and even 
 after a week's stay at a town these dawdlers who never had 
 watch or almanac want to know why we are running away ? 
 They are shocked at this horrible, this insulting " delirium 
 of speed." That look of odium seems to suggest that it is 
 all as bad as a man rushing through the National Gallery 
 on a bicycle to study the pictures. It is therefore with a 
 sick sense of futility we try to elaborate our explanation : 
 it all ends in high words and higher heads. Not much 
 Imitatio Christi about that business. 
 
 Even Livingstone on one such .worry-beset day lost his 
 head and whipped out a revolver d la St. Peter. And his 
 was no fly-away nature, remember : Scotch caution flowed 
 in his veins. The local chief insisted for days (with all a 
 weak man's obstinacy) on barring his progress, and the 
 Doctor flashed back in irritated expostulation. But the 
 fact that he had not even a nodding acquaintance with 
 their dialect made matters worse and tricked him into some 
 silly empty -revolver melodrama. Just so : the very thing 
 they were egging him on to do, the very thing Livingstone 
 regularly did not do. He regretted it afterwards. And in 
 his regret one mighty fact swallowed up all lesser emotions ; 
 I mean, the clear comprehension that this Dick Turpin 
 stunt was against his own ideal mode of moving amongst 
 these black Sons of Belial. He had written against it, 
 spoken against it, and years afterwards they cited this stupid 
 pistol-pointing episode against him to Giraud when he 
 came in from the East. Good old man ; his eyes had less 
 fire and more fatigue in those lessening days. 
 
 North near Mukungu's the natives had yelled at him, 
 then threatened, then threw stones at his canoe, but 
 Livingstone refused to hit back and ran on. Beaching the 
 boat at last on a sand spit he seasoned his frugal meal 
 with a little moral philosphy imtil calm contempt was 
 
ON THE ZIGZAG TRAIL 159 
 
 chased out of liis brain by the compassion that exculpated 
 the natives but saddled the Arabs with the blame. Or 
 was it because Feraji was grilling the legs of a guinea-fowl 
 with one hand while he roasted deliciously scented cofiee 
 with another on a mimosa log fire ? 
 
CHAPTER XII 
 STILL STRAIGHT SOUTH 
 
 Tou cannot get to London by sitting 
 on a Bradshaw guide, nor can the 
 African get anywhere by merely buying 
 a Bible he cannot read. Whats the 
 use of a looking-glass to a blind man ? 
 
 II 
 
" Time enough for the longest duty, but not for the shortest sin." 
 " We lie to God in prayer, if we do not rely on Him after prayer." 
 " Self-conceit is self-deceit." 
 
 " The Livingstone Cult." 
 
CHAPTER XII 
 STILL STRAIGHT SOUTH 
 
 WHITHER away? We foUow up the Luapula 
 (" The Piercer ") as far as Kavira's, then say 
 good-bye for quite a month as it rather resent- 
 fully takes a biggish bend west. Well-wooded hiUs now 
 lying athwart our path go rolling on and up into Ushiland. 
 The Luongo on its right bank is the Lunda limit of juris- 
 diction and old Kazembe's safe-conduct, thus far and 
 no farther, works wonders. Across stream is the northern 
 border of Ushiland, while farther up this same Luongo 
 the Kishinga people lord it under Chikumbi. These latter, 
 though not known to fame, are first in prowess and actually 
 drove ofi my old Mushidi's ne flus ultra war parties on the 
 west. But the British defeat at Kazembe's north gate 
 has now put the clock back for many a day and the blacks 
 are all cheeky. Moreover streaming up from the unknown 
 south come all sorts of congratulatory embassies, the 
 bearers of many a king's gift to the great Kazembe who 
 dared to stem the tide of advancing English. For his 
 fight was verily theirs, and is not he the northern gate- 
 keeper for the whole south 1 " The tallest trees are most 
 in the power of the winds," so the local proverb rims, and 
 does not Kazembe's challenge-name Muvangapulula mean 
 the " Ever-green-tree : — ^lop-my-branches but I-will-stiU 
 sprout " ? Hence these complimentary visits they are 
 paying him, for being the taUest monarchical tree in the 
 land, he gets most of the English annexation blast. But 
 they all wonder who we are, and whether Kazembe is mad 
 to let us thus through the lines to spy their land of promise. 
 You dare not be even a little casual. A lot of ready 
 resource and fine tact are necessary. Your inflated post- 
 victory negro can be insolently familiar : no Geneva Red 
 
 163 
 
164 STILL STRAIGHT SOUTH 
 
 Cross rules in here. Tlie Chief treated my " Livingstone " 
 message in far too jaunty and jocular a way, and began to 
 be desperately conversational, examining my camera with 
 extreme absorption, and finding it a good excuse for 
 changing " the salvation subject." He peered and pried 
 into the thing, and was surprised to hear that, having no 
 developer, long months might elapse and yet the minutest 
 detail would come out in developing, and all the result of 
 that fraction-of-a-second snap he saw me take to-day. As, 
 however, he had begun this camera subject far too obviously 
 to shut me up, I resolved to turn his own camera expedient 
 against him by way of a parting puncture. " Good-bye, 
 Mr. Chief, you despise it all, but remember, as the photo- 
 plate, so the soul of a negro ; a missionary hurries into 
 your town, hurries ofE, his ' three words ' a mere snapshot, 
 and away. Days grow into months, months into years, 
 but who knows if one day somehow, somewhither, you will 
 not go plunge into the bath of regeneration and then this 
 little snapshot sermon of to-day will all come out in finest 
 detail ! " These words measurably reduced the stature of 
 the man who locally ranks as No. 1, Class A. He drops 
 the inspection of the camera idea, at any rate, and by way 
 of a change is now looking with intense curiosity at nothing 
 whatever, " doctrine dodging " is their phrase. 
 
 No bull-at-a-gate methods either. The greased-lightning 
 express is not yet running in these latitudes. On the fourth 
 of July we found the earth revolving just as usual, and the 
 informative Chisunka took us into his confidence as to the 
 finesse necessary in approaching this mad Mieremiere. He 
 (C.) is a good sort who sees no visions and dreams no 
 dreams. Thinks our plan to cut through all obstacles is 
 like the curate's egg, only good in parts. Our minimum 
 baggage is maximum to him, and he thinks most bene- 
 volently that we should leave it all with him. Even such 
 small, selfish adjuncts of life as blankets and pots, what do 
 we need with them ? Denuded of all impedimenta we 
 could go anywhere. So he comes to business. Admiring 
 our nerve but not our judgment he smiles indulgently when 
 I wave my hand to the spotless sky and repeat my pet 
 dictum that the boundaries of nations are not the frontiers 
 
STILL STRAIGHT SOUTH 165 
 
 of human hearts. In a sincere more-in-sorrow-than-in- 
 anger tone, he insisted that we must now be placid nonen- 
 tities ; must not run in upon him abruptly ; must in fact 
 have two sets of heralds, two going on five days ahead and 
 two following these up. His third must is really a mustn't. 
 " And don't whisper about the plundered boat. Oh, no ! " 
 
 Then we get ofi and do a modest ten miles when we slacken 
 pace until Mieremiere expresses his desire for working 
 us into his scheme of things. We are supposed to have 
 no scheme of our own in another man's kingdom. Free- 
 dom is only another form for selfishness. But do not 
 yawn at this red-tape of black men. Counterbalancing 
 a multitude of villainies is this compensation of their 
 stringent ceremony defying you to throw it to the winds. 
 Not to platitudinise : we are here for the Christ of David 
 Livingstone Whose name is " the nail in a sure place." 
 And probably we can best explain this title by remembering 
 that a nail in hard wood needs much preliminary boring 
 by the gimlet of courtesy and ceremony. Otherwise the 
 hard wood of this repellent land will make a crooked nail 
 for you. To pooh-pooh all this negro ceremony is as bad 
 as trying to drive in a nail into ebony without a preliminary 
 use of the borer. 
 
 Across the bare plains in the morning comes a faint 
 but bitterly cold wind, a wind that has not ceased insidi- 
 ously to cut even when the sun is well up. River courses 
 on these pampas are not steep-banked as lower down, and 
 the result is soft marshes damp all the year round. Well 
 spoke a negro to-day, " A river is a man, give it time to 
 dilly-daUy and it will soon make a mess." The terrors of 
 taboo in Africa are such that even here where a bit of beef 
 is the tribal boon you can encounter a Vegetarian (mushi- 
 lanyama) whose very life lies in abjuring meat in any form — 
 here, mark you, where flesh of beast or even reptile is 
 summum honum. No mere food faddist, this solemn 
 Vegetarian's very name " Thou-shalt-not " challenges all 
 comers to prove against him even one breach of his cookery 
 code — thrives on it too, if one may judge from his alder- 
 manic abdomen. On the march it is amusing to see him 
 spot with gusto a mushroom peeping out of the forest 
 
166 STILL STRAIGHT SOUTH 
 
 undergrowth, " The Vegetarian's antelope," he calls this 
 fungus. Then clown-like he acts the part, simulating a 
 hunter's creeping stealthily on his bogus prey. You may 
 now behold this mock Nimrod solemnly stalking his mush- 
 room like a living thing, actually aiming his long stick 
 at it with the pleasant pretence of a baby boy playing at 
 shooting with papa's umbrella. Then finally the infantile 
 imitative bang from his explosive lips, as he pounces on 
 his slain mushroom ! The aggressive manner in which 
 he struts past the caravan, conceited curve on lips, flaunting 
 his dinner of " vegetable venison," is an amusing instance 
 of the pertinacious propaganda of vegetarianism. He 
 believes not only in cause and effect, but also in God who 
 causes all efiects. Has in fact a " grace before meat " 
 idea, the ritual of which runs : 
 
 " No rain, no mushrooms. 
 No God, no anything." 
 
 And no wonder, for as I have said, he thrives on it, this 
 dinner being quite a success from the gastromomical point 
 of view. He is fat as a thanksgiving turkey or a Christmas 
 goose, beans alone giving him more proteids than actual 
 venison ; say, 24 "5 from ground nuts as against 19 "3 in 
 lean meat. These ground nuts, too, run out in analysis 
 at 50 '0 fat as against 3 "6 in average lean meat. Even his 
 ill-smelling manioc treats the stomach far better than it 
 does the nostrils : an Englishman may hold his nose at 
 the manioc odour, but he cannot turn up that same member 
 at its marvellous chemical analysis. Peckolt proves it 
 to be more nutritive all round than wheat, stronger in pro- 
 teids and fat than this latter, and almost equal in starch. 
 So the cry for millet and maize as against manioc is only 
 partially justified ; the former have only 9-3 and 9-5 
 proteids to the latter's 12-78. 
 
 This bed-rock business of soil tillage recalls how each 
 child at birth is consecrated to the axe or hoe in the mid- 
 wife's cry, " He is for the axe," or " She is for the hoe." 
 Be it baby boy or baby girl, the very moment of birth has 
 an agricultviral implication in it. This " he is for the axe " 
 is the technical farmer's tool, and means that the man 
 

 
 
 TirK J-TliirT l.-OI! SAMTATIOX : ■■ll|-'rTIM! () I 'T TJIK 
 (■/.OTTKIi .AfA^SIOS (]!•' 'I' I M ) I Ml 'A I. S/.TMS." 
 
 1. 'I'hr -liii.ly stlvcls. ■_'. Aliotlicr l;iilil|i>r l.i'llillcl ^1 I M'jil (li.^ 
 
 hniir of i-vciiin^ pcinrc. ;;. 'I'hr ric;niiii;4' iii> of lljf iiufi\'i; Cdiii- 
 
 pniiiiils ilt iKifk. 
 Kili] 
 
STILL STRAIGHT SOUTH 167 
 
 makes way for tlie woman's hoe by clearing the thick bush 
 with his axe. This tillage of theirs is so amusingly the be-all 
 and end-aU of the African's life, that right on into civilisa- 
 tion his word for work of any sort (bricks, sawing, etc.) 
 is the same old " midimo," i.e. cultivation. To snule at 
 this verbal vagary of the African merely means that we are 
 twitting our own English tongue with the same etymological 
 error. Why forget that an artist in velvet coat, an artisan 
 with no coat at all, both derive from aro, I plough ? For, 
 coat or no coat, who will deny that the artist and artisan 
 are forced to go back to the land for the bread that is the 
 stag and staple of life ? Is not the verb " to be " in Latin 
 the same as " to eat " ? The artist cannot eat his pictures, 
 can he 1 Nor the artisan his bricks ? As Professor Max 
 Miiller said at Oxford : " Even in such a word as artistic, the 
 predicative power of the root ar, to plough, may still be 
 perceived. The Brahmans, who call themselves arya in 
 India, were no more aware of the real origin of this name 
 and its connection with agricultural labour, than the 
 artist who now speaks of his art as a divine inspiration 
 suspects that the word which he uses was originally appli- 
 cable only to so primitive an art as that of ploughing ! " 
 Towards the year's end and on into January, is the time 
 when semi-famine haunts these lands, almost 50 per cent, of 
 the staple red millet having been brewed off in a most in- 
 sidious fluid, hot heady beer. All this swilling (so they say) 
 because they " want \uku lava] to forget." Hence this 
 Nemesis famine as penalty for resting their cracked heads 
 on the breast of Old Booze. " To forget " was their 
 drunken objective, they sought oblivion in their beer ; 
 but famine never forgets, famine defies you to be oblivious. 
 Cassava (manioc), sheet anchor of the tropics, they despise 
 because there is no malt in it. Yet the God of David 
 Livingstone sends His rain on the evil and the good, 
 and He it is who again dramatically intervenes to save these 
 famished topers from their silly selves. This is the very- 
 season, this the very month, when man's extremity is God's 
 opportunity, and over twenty, to be exact, twenty-two, 
 different sorts of " God-grown " wild fruits are edible ; 
 not to name eleven sorts and sizes of forest roots, with nine 
 
168 STILL STRAIGHT SOUTH 
 
 more (perhaps twelve more) specimens of leaves of various 
 plants mashed into a spinach. All for the picking. All in 
 the same December, same January, that clamours for some 
 equivalent in edibles. Such is Heaven's revenge on black 
 boozers. We try all the time to clarify stupidity with 
 common sense, but they think we have the stupidity and 
 they the copyright of all common sense. Prepayment, for 
 example, is their initial demand for any purchase, the verb 
 " to die " being equivalent to " to pay " (fweta from fwa). 
 Buy a spear, an axe or a hoe and they say that the said 
 spear, etc., " dies " at a certain sum, the purchase price. 
 PenetratiQg their fog of metaphor I find this " die = pay " 
 analogy is the same as our English " the debt of nature " 
 equating " to die." Thus it is, as death looms ahead, the 
 superlative sum to be paid by every mortal aUve, and as 
 the lesser is contained in the greater, so through life all 
 smaller sums " paid " are only minor " deaths " compared 
 with the debt, the death, last and largest of all. 
 
 In order to change a subject that has not yet begun, I 
 must remark that the nakeder the natives about here 
 the merrier the mob. Livingstone, it is said, died leaving 
 a pathetic one shiUing and sixpence in his purse ; pathetic, 
 for money had no currency in these lands, his great barter 
 being beads. He set out with 14J loads and these beads 
 were clamoured for in some places, but repudiated as not a la 
 mode in others. Get the right size and colour and you have 
 captured the tribal heart. Mere calico is minor compared 
 with beads : " We do not want cloth," is their cry, " give us 
 something to wear ! Give us beads." More clothes means 
 more worry, their euphemism for " worry " being an 
 indelicate phrase about fleas gendered in the creases of the 
 cloth. Such is their symbolism for the worries attendant on 
 the clothed state — ^these scratchy clothes. 
 
 Worse than that, they say only the dead deserve to be 
 clothed, this obviously to hide their offensive corruption ; 
 hence the verb fwala, " to dress," is the same root as " to 
 die." Thus, at the back of the black man's brain, " dress " 
 as a technical term means " deformity hiding," hence this 
 cheeky mob of nearly-naked smilers boasting they were 
 (" look at us ! ") formed not deformed. As a concession 
 
STILL STRAIGHT SOUTH 169 
 
 to circumstances, however, they wear skins flapping fore 
 and aft, saying, d la Genesis iii. 21, they are " God-made " 
 garments because no weaver ever turned out an antelope's 
 skin. The looms of God gave both man and antelope their 
 skins, but as antelopes were made for man (not the man for 
 the antelope) so the one skinis stripped to keep the other skin 
 warm. Oh, but they are a mad lot and many a missionary 
 in the future will find the clothing of their black bodies 
 operates conversely to the stripping of their souls. I 
 told them it is rather like the great Persian, so unhappy 
 that his astrologers declared the royal happiness coidd only 
 be assured by his wearing the shirt of a perfectly happy 
 man. So they searched high, searched low, searched court, 
 city, country, but all in vain till they got him at last, yes, 
 got the perfectly happy man of their quest. And he was 
 a labourer coming from his work. And he, oh ! my masters, 
 he had no shirt at all. On hearing this no-clothes-no- 
 sorrow episode they laughed the laugh of self -justification, 
 again making their execrable etymology " fleas " = " wor- 
 ries " run together like steel to magnet. " For no shirt on 
 his back means no fleas thereon, and no fleas means no 
 worries, etc. " But I wasn't taking any. They laughed loud 
 at this, but I did not give it even the benediction of a smile. 
 My conclusion was quite the contrary : what is the good of 
 our meeting, mystifying and misimderstanding each other 1 
 " No," I rattled out, " this no-clothes conception must 
 stop, for the first thing God did to man on the road to his 
 redemption was to clothe him." 
 
 Slaving parties having swept the land, this explains how 
 all through the Last Journals the bitter problem seems to 
 be how to get even the meanest sort of native cereals for 
 sale. Yet he gets his little laugh out of this extremity 
 in edibles. " The Ptolemaic map," he writes, " defines the 
 people of Africa according to their food. The Elephant- 
 ophagi, the Struthiophagi, the Ichthyophagi, and Aiithro- 
 pophagi. " If we followed the same sort of classification our 
 definition would be the drink, thus : " the tribe of stout- 
 guzzlers, the roaring potheen-fuddlers, the whisky-fishoid- 
 drinkers, the vin-ordinaire-bibbers, the lager-beer-swillers, 
 and an outlying tribe of the brandy-cocktail persuasion." 
 
170 STILL STRAIGHT SOUTH 
 
 All very breezy for a hungry dying man with a supper 
 of wild mushroom or brown beans. The old monks said, 
 " Man is what he eats," and this, as I have pointed out, their 
 own Latin language reminded them : every time they said 
 " non est " they were proclaiming the fact that the verb 
 " to be " and " to eat " are the same. Do not even we 
 speak about " com(esf)ibles " ? The African says, " Drink 
 beer, think beer," and all over the vast interior the verb 
 " to be " [di) and " to eat " are the same. Even that 
 devil's deputy, a Luban cannibal, defends his defiliag 
 meal of " black beef " by saying, " Eat man and you become 
 doubly man." 
 
 " Folks is folks," and here is the reason why. The world 
 is not so wide after all : St. Paul gripped me to-day ; 
 his one line to Timothy " give attendance to reading " 
 set me ofE. Hence my giving a mere en passant lesson to 
 some boys in syllables. Paul began it and Paul was in the 
 whole ding-dong attempt. Picking out ta and da, I tried 
 to drum it into my Juniors, but never a ta or da would they, 
 could they echo back. They of the pug noses nasalised 
 the whole lot, nta, always nta — nda, always nda, but never 
 once plain ta or da. I was piqued, but finally burst out 
 laughing when it dawned on me that Paul, as a small boy, 
 had learned this very rule in his Greek school that n can 
 only stand before t and d. Besides, Paul is not done with 
 us : try them with the labial p. Ask them for a hundred 
 hours to say npa and they will be forced to pronounce 
 mpa for npa. Thus the Paul who began this business with 
 his " give attendance to reading " was as much in the lesson 
 at the end as the beginning : all his n's before p became m 
 a la Africa. 
 
 St. Paul again : this time it was an inadequate attempt 
 to translate a bit of his Epistle to that same Timothy. 
 The first rough draft is futile because wooden : but what 
 spurs you on is Paul's own cry, " Fulfil ye my joy." Come 
 to the point : Is not Paul in Heaven interested in the fate 
 of his glorious Epistles not yet translated in our far and 
 foreign tongue ? Yes, down comes his cry, " Fulfil ye my 
 joy " in seeing these Epistles of mine reach out to the 
 earth's end, for the last shaU be first. Yes, " fulfil ye my 
 
STILL STRAIGHT SOUTH 171 
 
 joy " in the translating and printing of my Romans, my 
 Galatians, my Ephesians and all the rest, for they are not 
 mine but thine. To use that great prepositional American- 
 ism it is " up to us " because it comes down to us from the 
 excellent glory ; I mean, Paul fro Christ sounding down 
 night and day this " Fulfil ye my joy, my Pauline joy, 
 in this matter of my Epistles " ! Was his " Corinthians " 
 written to those at Corinth only ? Did he not add, " to 
 all that in every "place call upon the name of Jesus Christ 
 our Lord both theirs and ours " ? So it comes to this, 
 drastically to this, that Africa, all Africa must get that 
 " Corinthians " of his. 
 
 When these polyglot natives gather for service, then it is, 
 d la Livingstone, a powerful contrast grips you ; I mean, 
 that old obvious difierence between The Old and The New, 
 between Law and Grace. What an inversion between our 
 forest hymn and those exiles by the streams of Babel who 
 whined against singing the Lord's song in a strange land. 
 " How shall we sing the Lord's song in a strange land ? " 
 said they — how not, indeed ? In the New Testament a 
 strange land is the very place to sing it. The stranger the 
 land the newer the song. The farther you go the nearer it 
 becomes. This is no digression, remember ; these exiles 
 hunched up and disconsolate have set me going in a 
 double sense, because but for Babel, literal or linguistic 
 Babel, I would never have seen these lands, never studied 
 their languages, never written this book. " Babel," the 
 very word is a contrastive challenge between Genesis 
 xi. and Mark xvi. : was it not at that very Babel God 
 in judgment scattered men abroad on the face of the 
 earth ? Just as in grace He follows up those very 
 wanderers in Mark xvi. by sending the Gospel into all the 
 world to every creature ? Look at the literal Genesis 
 xi. words : "So the Lord scattered them abroad from 
 Babel upon the face of all the earth." Then run on to the 
 Mark xvi. command that follows them up : "Go ye into 
 all the world, and preach the Gospel to every creature." 
 
 There is a double check. For does not this preaching 
 postulate some sort of lingo in ' which to preach ? There 
 is no need here for any slipshod surmising. The Babel- 
 
172 STILL STRAIGHT SOUTH 
 
 deed is doubled when you contrast the confounding of the 
 language of those scattered polyglots with the day of 
 Pentecost when God caused every man to hear the Gospel 
 in his own tongue. Mark and contrast " that they might 
 not understand one another's speech " of Genesis xi. 
 with " now hear we every man in his own language whereia 
 he was born " of Acts ii. 8, Then, ye of the Livingstone 
 Cult laugh loud, not the laugh of levity but loyalty, as 
 you see the same old amusing '' confounded " occurring 
 in the same Genesis, same Acts. The former says they 
 were " confounded " because of not being able to speak. 
 The latter says they were " confounded " because they all 
 heard in their own tongue. 
 
 " Go to, let U3 go down and there core- "Now they were confounded, 
 
 found their language, that they may because every man heard them in his 
 
 not understand one another's speech " own language " (Acts ii. 6). 
 (Gen. xi. 7). 
 
 It is, I suppose, superfluous to remind the reader that 
 far from my having gone ofi at a word, this is the very 
 expletive of tongue-tied newcomers' " confounded " ! In 
 their exasperation the natives call it " hankalwa ! " 
 {" confounded," from verb " to confound "), and the 
 English in rousing old Anglo-Saxon echo the same " con- 
 founded ! " both uttering this Babel-password with that 
 old quick gesture of repudiation reiterated round the globe. 
 Too often this leads to the Kiplingese solution of pudding- 
 stone pronunciation, when, as with the Sergeant, 
 
 " It was neither Hindustani, French nor Coptic ; 
 It was odds and ends and leavings of the same, 
 Translated with a stick (which is reaUy half the trick), 
 And Pharaoh harked to Sergeant What's-his-name." 
 
 To get ofi into the long grass, means that any permanent 
 and permissible picture of the route must never ignore 
 our little path twisting ahead like a cork-screw trail. 
 This is the old slave track, and even at the risk of being 
 accused of lacking a true literary discretion or reticence, 
 I propose to restore the balance of this narrative by record- 
 ing the fact that " saintly " souls have, in days gone by, 
 so trafficked in the bodies and souls of negroes. This 
 is only another armoying illustration of the truth that the 
 
STILL STRAIGHT SOUTH 173 
 
 ecstasy of a mystic is a poor proof of sanctity : that in fact, 
 feelings are only like fiddle-strings — screw them up and 
 play any tune you like on them. Nor need you go far 
 to prove it. Here in the middle of this old slave track we 
 camp to keep the Lord's Supper, the witness of our cor- 
 porate life, and in this connection a curious case of dis- 
 Hlusionment occurs. The hymn we sing is John Newton's 
 grand old favourite, " How sweet the name of Jesus 
 sounds," a hymn hushed iq that leafy sanctuary in the 
 heart of the forest ; sanctuary, alas ! through which the 
 old slave track ran out to the ocean. 
 
 True, we are the guests of God enjoying the hospi- 
 talities of Heaven, but there is an ugly discord of the 
 worst teeth-on-edge kind. Where does it come in if not 
 in the ugly fact that this dear John Newton of Olney did 
 most damnably continue to carry on the slave trade for 
 many years after his conversion ? You may draw all your 
 distinctions, allow all your extenuations, but finally must 
 face the fact that he it was who penned these ugly words : 
 " I never knew sweeter or more frequent hours of divine 
 communion than in my last two [slave !] voyages to Guinea." 
 Fancy the Lord's Table spread across that slave track, 
 then fancy further the conflicting emotions of the same 
 John Newton as arch-slaver and arch-hymnwriter, both 
 the slaving and hymn writing in his Christian career. This 
 singing-slaving atrocity rankles all the time the wind 
 tries to make amends by producing cathedral music from 
 the swaying trees. Is not this the very slave track and this 
 the very hymn of the slaver ? 
 
 Such are the contrary yet co-existing tendencies of the 
 human heart that the very Bill of Lading of a slave- 
 cargo contained the Christian tag that these chattels were 
 duly shipped by " the Grace of God." But, after all, 
 good John Newton could shut our mouths in this matter 
 of distracting thoughts at the Lord's Table. For who 
 ever suggests that his hymn ran : " How sweet the 
 name of Newton sounds " ? Does not the memorial 
 command brush aside all such human phantoms in the 
 sweeping, centralising words : " This do in remembrance 
 of Me " ? And if the supreme Eucharistic privilege 
 
174 STILL STRAIGHT SOUTH 
 
 be to forget ourselves and remember Ckrist, then can we 
 surely forget the John Newton who really, after aU, did die 
 a beloved bond-servant of Jesus Christ. William Jay 
 saw John just at the end of his life. The mind and tongue 
 of the old preacher were past their business : " My memory 
 is nearly gone," he murmured, " but I remember two 
 things : that I am a great sinner, and that Christ is a great 
 Saviour." The same stout old warrior this who passed 
 along a word of cheer to all Missionaries : "I, John 
 Newton, cannot despair of the ultimate conversion of 
 the heathen when I remember the power of the Gospel 
 upon myself." 
 
 Lookmg west across the Luapula reminds me that we 
 are now cut off from the Atlantic by the blocking of the 
 western slave trail. Thus the salient and unassailable 
 truth now stares us in the face that we must link up with 
 this eastern side and the Indian Ocean. This we accept 
 with alacrity when we remember what a predatory creature 
 our west-coast Bihean is, a man who has been merely 
 exploiting us for his own slaving purposes. With his keen 
 faculty for drawing rapid deductions he had reckoned on 
 penetrating the interior under the wing of the Missionaries, 
 the delivery of even a few letters being his perverse pretext 
 for plying the old trade in the souls of men. Certainly, 
 the Belgians have resolved to break the back of this western 
 traffic, and imder the name " Vamoyo " have struck terror 
 far out west into the Luvale country. Thus the duel begins 
 between the Congo State and these Portuguese slavers, a 
 struggle that will be marked by many rough reprisals. 
 Large slave caravans led by old roadsters like Sachitota 
 and Luiz have been attacked and plundered by the Belgians, 
 but when this news spread west a passion for Martinis 
 began, and large sums were paid to the Portuguese for 
 breech-loaders. Ten, fifteen, and even twenty slaves 
 were paid for one repeating rifle, the accessory cartridges 
 even fetching higher prices stiU. One slave per ten 
 cartridges was considered a fair figure. 
 
 A sorry story this gun-running finally became, for one 
 oily little Englishman wriggled in from Loanda and, with 
 all the sang-froid of Captain Kettle, hoisted The Jack and 
 
STILL STRAIGHT SOUTH 175 
 
 sold dozens of Martinis for slaves. Followed up by a band 
 of State soldiers, this Uttle man was deserted by Ms natives, 
 so be calmly piled up his iron trunks across the traU, took 
 cover, and in a series of long singing shots opened fire 
 on the advancing soldiers through the loopholes formed by 
 his 60-lb. trunks. But when the soldiers saw one after 
 another of their number roll over wounded, the forest 
 rang with their hullabaloo and back they rushed to head- 
 quarters, saying in sober earnest, " Never man shot like 
 this man." A black-art notion this, that because it was 
 only one man who thus struck terror into them, that there- 
 fore they must flee. As clever with his tongue as with his 
 •303, this little Captain Kettle is the type who sits down in 
 the forest and gripping your arm with a confidential em- 
 phasis calmly gives you chapter and verse for slavery from 
 the Law and the Prophets, adding blandly that there is 
 more serfdom in urban England than in rural Africa. All 
 this siUy screed as though no Jesus Christ had ever lived, 
 died, and rose again to abolish it. Another smuggler of 
 a more truculent type was an Irishman to his bone and 
 marrow — a Tipperary boy (I could swear to the brogue !) 
 who could scarcely write his own name. This waster's 
 endless brag was that his brother was an Irish M.P., and 
 his stock phrase to brow-beat ofl&cials was the threat in 
 broadest brogue, " Shure and I'll write to me brother in the 
 House." 
 
 With this shutting of the Lualaba crossing our old Bi- 
 heans have poured into the north and sold tons of powder 
 to the Lubans. Shut out from our Katanga they now 
 resolve to reciprocate and shut us in, so out there at the 
 Kapa cross-roads in mid-forest these slavers gathered 
 the other day in their thousands and dramatically put this 
 country under formal curse and interdict. Standing at the 
 " fork-roads " looking east, there they are waving their 
 fetishes threateningly and pouring torrents of tirade into 
 the African air. Then they proceed formally to " block " 
 the road in to us by " the ceremony of the curse," regardless 
 of the reflex law ordaining that compliments come home 
 to roost. What is this " ceremony of the curse " ? (1) A 
 powder barrel is ominously fiUed with sand to remind us 
 
176 STILL STRAIGHT SOUTH 
 
 of the sort of powder the interior tribes had before he, the 
 Bihean, had mercy on them and imported the European 
 kind from the west. (2) This taunting barrel of sand is 
 now put across the eastern trail (i.e. our old trunk road in 
 from the Atlantic) and then an old bow and blunt arrow 
 are laid on the top of it, eloquent with irony as to their 
 primitive weapon, and finally topping all comes a worn-out 
 antelope skin — the climax of insult as to their old-time 
 nakedness. Farewell, burly friends ! in a less flattering 
 sense we agree that ye did make these far-interior lands 
 what they are, a pandemonium of slaughter, a charnel- 
 house of woe. 
 
 Is there no gleam of hope even here ? Yes, my former 
 senior colleague, Mr. Swan, adds a postscript to it all. 
 Years ago one such slaver saw Christ as the liberator of 
 slaves, he, an old slaver, greatest slave of all. Living in 
 illicit union with a black woman, he proved sincerity of 
 soul by marrying this mother of his children. Then came 
 the conversion of this surprised wife, surprised at the change 
 in her partner, surprised at the new life beginning for her. 
 The next phase is a break with Africa, and in 1911 he 
 goes home to Portugal, boldly bringing wife and children 
 with him. But there is trouble lurkmg ahead for him, 
 trouble with lawyers and legal documents. Be it explained, 
 although his old partnership with his brother was mutually 
 and morally dissolved, yet a failure to get this duly docu- 
 mented by a lawyer is going to be his undoing. The brother 
 in Africa has neither relented nor repented : he still con- 
 tinues to exploit their joint-names, runs up a pile of debts 
 and — absconds ! Then the long arm of Portugal, having 
 failed to catch the real culprit, stretches across from Angola 
 to Lisbon and arrests the astounded brother who had washed 
 his hands of it long ago. The authorities also take pos- 
 session of all money he has in the bank. Then comes a 
 nice point. What about that sum of money, hard- 
 earned money, he had handed over to the Mission some time 
 ago for aggressive spiritual work ? Surely the Missionary 
 is right in refunding it fro tern. Yes, refund is the verb 
 but pro tern, is its authentic adverb, and this fro tern, he 
 never forgets, no, nor the intervening 4 per cent. Thus it 
 
STILL STRAIGHT SOUTH 177 
 
 was lie was taken away back to Africa for his trial, but 
 God so stood by the man who so stood by Him that he was 
 released on promise to work off all those debts of another. 
 It was a ten years' struggle, but he did it all and nobly, 
 the last payment being his proudest and pleasantest. 
 I mean, of course, the refunding plus 4 per cent, of that old 
 gift he gave long ago, a gift for the progress of God's work 
 in the souls of men. 
 
 Livingstone's favourite, the Apostle Paul, boasted about 
 his " manner of entering in among them," but I am afraid 
 our caravan coming out of the grass must look the advance 
 guard of a travelling circus. The milch goat leads the way 
 on a string, then comes the cook, our camp clock ringing out 
 the early hours with precision, then a dog, then one of the 
 many local monkeys, and then, perhaps the great Circus 
 Hengler himself — a Missionary on a donkey. So on we 
 go " southing " it, and to introduce you to the sort of 
 country we are passing through is simplicity itself. A strip 
 of thickish forest with lofty trees, slabs of grey granite lying 
 awkwardly around, then the inevitable soft peat bog. 
 The first notion, as you come out of the trees, is a velvet- 
 like meadow, but soon, splash! splash ! undeceives. Living- 
 stone coming down from Kisinga, in one stretch of sixty 
 miles only, had to cross twenty-nine of these squirting 
 sponges, one for every two miles. They are super-saturated 
 with oxide of iron from the big patches of brown haematite 
 that crop out everywhere, and streams of this oxide, as 
 thick as treacle, are seen moving slowly along in the sponge, 
 like small red glaciers. His own description is best : 
 " These sponges are met with in slightly depressed valleys 
 without trees or bushes, in a forest country where the grass, 
 being only a foot or fifteen inches high, and thickly planted, 
 often looks like a beautiful glade in a gentleman's park in 
 England. They are from a quarter of a mile to a mile 
 broad, and from two to ten or more miles long. When 
 past the stream, and apparently on partially dry ground, 
 one may jog in a foot or more, and receive a squirt of black 
 mud up the thighs : it is only when you reach the trees 
 and are off the sour land that you feel secure from mud and 
 leeches. As one has to strip the lower part of the person 
 12 
 
178 STILL STRAIGHT SOUTH 
 
 in order to ford them, I found that often four were as many 
 as we could cross in a day." 
 
 They tell us that right on from September 1866 to Decem- 
 ber 1868 he never saw sugar, never saw coffee, never saw 
 tea, and when some one at Kazembe gave him a dish 
 cooked with honey " it nauseated from its horrible sweet- 
 ness." " This is the true Lent," says Livingstone, " why 
 not spend the forty days off among the outlying tribes 
 bearing unavoidable hunger and thirst with a good grace ? 
 Fastings and vigils without a special object in view are time 
 run to waste. They are made to minister to a sort of self- 
 gratification instead of being turned to account for the 
 good of others. They are like groaning in sickness. Some 
 people amuse themselves when ill with continuous 
 moaning." 
 
 Thus this man was not David Livingstone for nothing, 
 so let us follow him farther south. 
 
"*#^' 
 
BOOK III 
 
 CHAPTER XIII 
 ALONG LONGITUDE 29° 
 
 Livingstone detested what he called 
 " geographical Christianity" and, to 
 test his talk, here hidden in Ajrica he 
 has God as Spectator, all the way, all 
 the day. 
 
" My views of what is missionary duty are not so contracted as those 
 whose ideal is a dumpy sort of man with a Bible under his arm." 
 
 Livingstone. 
 " / read the whole Bible through four times whilst I was in 
 Manyema." 
 
 Idem. 
 " The Bible gathers wonderful interest from the circumstances 
 in which it is read." 
 
 Idem. 
 
CHAPTEE XIII 
 
 ALONG LONGITUDE 29° 
 
 BE it remembered we are still going straight soutli. 
 Aping the Kazembe arrangement down-stream, a 
 dual chieftainship is common up here, even a 
 triad is not rare. But the ideal is a young man, thick- 
 necked and vociferous, with greed vulpine and wives legion. 
 However, life is not all strawberries and cream, even for 
 this fortunate fellow : his harem often gets out of hand 
 and goes on strike, '' the crowing hens and the silent cock " 
 idea. Add to this the decline in prestige of his little law- 
 court under the big tree, a decline caused by most astound- 
 ing decisions, for Mulundu said to me with a tricky twinkle : 
 " Litigation is our profession." And don't they generally 
 victimise the honest old mat-maker or the fisherman ? 
 Seest thou a man diligent in his business in Ushiland, verily 
 he will soon stand before kings — on a summons for seizure 
 of his goods. 
 
 All the ingenuity of their laughable law, and all its cruelty, 
 are brought into operation to crush the industry out of the 
 town, and why wonder that the iron-workers combine to 
 form a formidable cult ? But even this Chief, fertile in 
 false expedients, is forced on occasion to own up that the 
 decision in some of these curious lawsuits debated is utterly 
 beyond his ken. Of one such lawyer's puzzle he said : " Ah ! 
 gentlemen, this tangled case is a mote-in-the-eye difficulty. 
 If it were merely a mucus-in-the-nose puzzle, I would blow 
 it out, but alas ! a mote-in-the-eye difficulty — idu ! idu ! " 
 Nevertheless this contrasting of the eyes with the nose is 
 very uncommon, for the Vemba rule is the reverse. For 
 instance, here are two men who struck up such a close 
 friendship of the Da vid-and- Jonathan sort that they were 
 called " Messrs. Nose and Eyes." The reason is, that these 
 
 181 
 
182 ALONG LONGITUDE 29° 
 
 two members are in such close sympathy with each other 
 that the eyes water when the nose is in trouble, even as 
 vice versa the nose runs when the eyes are in a fix. Again : 
 any chief who slams his village-gate on us and refuses to 
 " receive " is also called Mr. Eyes. Ask them why, and 
 they respond : " The eyes receive no visitors ; if even a 
 speck of dust enters, they weep tears." A good descrip- 
 tion this of us two Missionaries, two specks of dust who, if 
 they entered the town of Mr. Eyes, would make him weep. 
 
 These lawsuits are long verbose things full of rockets 
 and red fire. Beginning as a mere trickle of nouns, verbs, 
 and adjectives, the stream of this bush lawyer's rhetoric 
 flows on with gathered and growing volume in an ever- 
 deepening channel of imited purpose and unexhausted re- 
 solve — to rob the other fellow. His loquacious climax 
 would make you laugh imless you knew and anticipated 
 this antic. For he winds it all up with a song ! This 
 cracked time is the technical climax. It is a parable he 
 is singing, and this parable when sung (not spoken) is 
 equivalent to a man underlining what he has written. To 
 merely sfeah this legal parable is equal to only writing 
 it ; whereas to sing it for emphasis is like italicising the 
 words already written. Fancy the Gilbertian fun in Euro- 
 pean courts if every lawyer in clinching his argument had 
 to burst out in warbling song by way of emphasising his 
 point. The wizened old man who snapped ofi his 
 gibble-gabble and shrilled his terminal song in parable, 
 certainly the one and only point he did prove was that 
 he could not sing a note. 
 
 Here is a specimen charge-sheet for you. (1) Paying 
 sweetly for sweets : The accused was begged to buy honey 
 and demurred to purchase. "Nay, but taste a little to sample 
 same," quoth the honey man. Result, one lick of the 
 profiered honey and — a lawsuit. (2) Look out how you 
 look : The accused looked at a manioc field too long, too 
 intently. Result : the evil eye — and a lawsuit, for a cat 
 may look at a king, but a native must not look at another's 
 field. (3) A case of one cross making him more cross : 
 Accused came to cross roads, found a " patteran " of green 
 sprig of leaves lying across one of the bisected paths, 
 
THK ICIXG AllltlVK, 
 
 1S2] 
 
ALONG LONGITUDE 29° 183 
 
 stepped over the leaves and — a lawsuit. (4) He would 
 have wood : Accused gathered a few twigs in the woods, 
 and was told that the parcel of ground on which he stood 
 was a man's field, prospective field, and— a lawsuit. (5) 
 Three sorts of " wells " : Accused drank from a well and 
 — well, it was not well with him — a lawsuit. (6) Two 
 " dumps " : Accused entered a camp, dumped his load on 
 the ground and — a lawsuit. " How dare you, a mere 
 stranger, camp without a royal permit to do so ? " (7) 
 Two " finds " : A having left a basket on the trail, dis- 
 appeared for a moment, and B coming along the road 
 found what he thought was a lost basket, but found — a 
 lawsuit instead. (8) Three plays on " rest " : A sat 
 down by the road to rest, but there is no rest for the wicked 
 and — the rest of the story runs that, like a bolt from the 
 blue, B drops on him, charging him with disturbing the 
 graves of Ms ancestors — a lawsuit. (9) Solemn saliva: 
 A man spitting on the ground successfully evaded four of 
 a local man's iutruding toes but left the faintest trickle 
 on the fifth. Sequel : one slave and sixty yards of calico 
 as solatium and damages. 
 
 It is the old inversion that the law of many a " lawsuit 
 does not suit the litigant." The very vagueness of data 
 is the reason why their forensic shouts rend the air. The 
 gesticulation is so wonderful that it would have pleased 
 even that Irishman who, while complimenting his undemon- 
 strative but clever advocate on the successful issue of his 
 pleading, protested nevertheless that he did not " squander 
 his carcass enough." The crowning absurdity in these 
 lawsuits (literally, " words ! ") is their digging up the name 
 of God from the depths of their devildom and trying to get 
 leverage for their lie from the name of deity. What, then, 
 does it all mean : this inveterate racial habit of punctuating 
 a black lie with blasphemy ? You have not long to wait 
 for your answer : going along the path a few miles, you 
 peer into a hamlet and one glance discovers the true key 
 to this lock of lying. There you have a dozen natives 
 grouped round a small pot and you can see the boiling- 
 water ordeal appealed to. That is to say, so hard-mouthed 
 is the negro that both sides brazen out their denial of a 
 
184 ALONG LONGITUDE 29° 
 
 crime tintil the only resort is the scalding-water ordeal. 
 What has driven them into this stupid legal cul-de-sac ? 
 The hard cross- swearing of a nation of liars is such that 
 they are forced to gamble away the decision by appealing 
 to the " poison " test. Hardness of mouth could not 
 decide the matter, hence they demand the " boiling- water " 
 test, in order to make the decision hinge on hardness of skin. 
 What with hard mouths and hard skins no wonder the 
 Africans are such a hard lot. 
 
 What hours of wrangling could not do, behold this " heads 
 I win, tails you lose " solution, and the two litigants decide 
 all as they plunge hands into the scalding water. A timid 
 truthful woman with soft hands is sure to lose her appeal. 
 Yet this ordeal, although the falsest of things, is the strong- 
 est thread in the fabric of tribal life ; here, indeed, " every 
 mouth is stopped," and the appeal crushingly final. 
 Deduction : mere hardness of skin is the African touch- 
 stone of truth, and the more thick-skinned the liar, the surer 
 of acquittal by this scalding- water appeal. Think of a race 
 for centuries with this fact soaking into its soul, that the 
 biggest liars can bluff the " boUing-water " ordeal, and be 
 pubUcly declared guiltless. It means (and mark this !) 
 that each negro believes each lie is the truth, his mental 
 warp being hopeless because this " poison test " is such a 
 hoary institution, utterly silencing in character. This 
 supreme touch-stone of " truth," in other words, is a mUl 
 for turning out liars, hence that most famous saying in 
 African law-courts : " Let a liar alone ! lies are not action- 
 able at law." Do you wonder now, that the African is a 
 liar and the truth is not in him ? Farther east they despise 
 the mere Juramento of boiling water and drink pure poison, 
 the Calabar bean. 
 
 All this is deplorable, but the trouble is that any new 
 on-coming ofl&cial who cannot speak the native lingo may 
 blunder into a " bush lawyer's " decision just as " chancy " 
 as this very ordeal. Certainly on this subj ect Gordon Pasha 
 is nothing if not the very soul of breezy frankness : his 
 famous " bag-of-rice " simile will descend to posterity as a 
 true picture of hundreds of officials and their random deeds 
 in Central Africa. Watch what he wrote to Sir Eichard 
 
ALONG LONGITUDE 29° 185 
 
 Burton, and all tlie more dangerous stuff because galvan- 
 ised with a false Calvinism : "I daresay," writes Gordon, 
 " you wonder how I can get on without an interpreter, 
 and not knowing Arabic. I do not believe in man's free 
 will, and therefore, believe all things are from God and 
 preordained. Such being the case, the judgments or 
 decisions I give are fixed to be thus or thus, whether I have 
 exactly hit ofi the circumstances or not. This is my raft, 
 and on it I float along, thanks to God, more or less success- 
 fully. I do not pretend my belief could commend itself 
 to any wisdom or science or in fact anything : but as I 
 have said elsewhere, a bag of rice jolting along these roads 
 could, if it had the gift of speech, and if it were God's will, do 
 as well as I do. You may not agree with me. Keep 
 your own belief. I get my elixir from mine, viz. that with 
 these views I am comfortable whether I am a failure or not, 
 and can disregard the world's summary of what I do, or 
 what I do not do." 
 
 Now here is a man, the cream of earth's sons, at his old 
 glory of speaking in plain English. A master workman, 
 too, of the whole tribe of administration officials, this 
 irrepressible Gordon tears aside the veil that hides so many 
 of these anti-negro " bag-of-rice " decisions. (Gordon knew 
 as much of Arabic as the Irishman did of the page of Heb- 
 rew : a bit of a musician, Patrick, in answer to the question 
 whether he could read some Hebrew characters they showed 
 him, said " Eead it ? Shure, and I could play it ! ") 
 Gordon does not seem to see that his " bag-of-rice " pro- 
 position when fully stated has in it the elements of its own 
 disintegration and decay, " if it had the gift of speech " is 
 just the whole point. Neither the rice nor the Gordon 
 who ate the same could speak the language. 
 
 It needs no proof, and scarce even a reminder, that the 
 best because busiest bees in the hive of Central Africa 
 are those tough old blacksmiths who turn out the iron 
 ore. 
 
 " The little smith of Nottingham 
 Who does the work that no man can." 
 
 These sons of old Tubal Cain can boycott the whole 
 country because they have the local chiefs wholly in the 
 
186 ALONG LONGITUDE 29° 
 
 hollow of their hand : no smith equates no soldier ; 
 no T. Cain means no sword or ploughshare. They have 
 long bony hands on which the muscles stand out like whip- 
 cords. Made not of flesh and blood but of asbestos, these 
 funny fingers of theirs can juggle with live coals and scarcely 
 be burned, hence the common conceit is to call their 
 fingers " Firetongs " (Fimanto). There is poetry in these 
 brawny blacks, but they live their poetry like men instead 
 of siagiiig it like birds, and far and near they surely have 
 their reward. All eyes look Kishbiga way, when the roar 
 of the rains is near. Those hxmdreds of nules of snuling 
 African tillage are all traceable to this man who digs the 
 ore from the hillside and manufactures hoes, spears and 
 axes. Although their ideas are crude, still they combine 
 in a clever cult, the caste of Tubal Cain call it. Bound by 
 a code of stringent laws, their " thou-shalt-nots " are a 
 pathetic mix-up of soul and matter, faith and works, mud 
 and stars. They are sworn to temporal celibacy ; severely 
 dieted ; can only eat out of certain pots ; cannot, dare not, 
 eat certain animals, e.g. the hare. Their guild furnaces 
 make quite a show of hard enterprise, and the function of 
 filling these is the occasion of a solemn fast when no soul 
 of man other than these sons of Tubal Cain can be about. 
 Then it is all the folks shut themselves indoors while this 
 " furnace-feeding " process is going on, the men of the cult 
 calling out menacingly the while. But as most things in 
 Africa are a mad mixture of mind and mud, the fetich, i.e. 
 religious element, is of primary importance in it all. This 
 in the end is the one mighty fact that swallows up all their 
 lesser emotions. 
 
 For it is " God's ore," they say, and this Spirit-media- 
 tion theory of theirs is only a frank refusal of these blacks 
 to admit that mere stout arms and tough muscles have 
 all the say in God's own world. " Who first drinks, first 
 thanks," say they. And this African of ours with his 
 " other- worldliness " is deeply touching — woiddn't even 
 condescend to argue with an atheist. " How do I know 
 there is a God ? " he asks. " How do I know my goat 
 passed over that wet ground if not by the footprints she 
 left in the mud ? " Thus any such phrase as " laws of 
 
ALONG LONGITUDE 29° 187 
 
 Nature " is unknown to him, for an act postulates an agent, 
 and what is Nature but God's mere minion ? No atheist 
 could hoodwink a black man with the notion that mere laws 
 explaia everything, for your negro retorts, "As if a law 
 does not require construction as well as a world ! " (It 
 is as bad as forbidding Livingstone the use of his favourite 
 word " providence " because it postulates a god. But 
 why forget that its verbal alternative " fortunate " only 
 drives you back iuto the arms of a heathen goddess. For- 
 tune 1) Another of these men proved the existence of 
 God by the quiet query : " Who ever forgot there was a 
 sun ? " A proof this that he reads his Book of Nature so 
 well that in every rock and tree God is staring him in the 
 eyes and shouting in his ears.^ 
 
 Ushiland unrolls the panorama of her rivers before us, 
 stUl switchback a little but ascending withal; path of 
 pudding-stone and oftener soft sand. These negro vandals 
 have deforested long stretches of land for the cultivation 
 of red millet, then admit like the most advanced scientists 
 that all this tampers with rainfall ! For every fifty yards 
 of garden about two hundred yards of adjacent trees are 
 pollarded, branches dragged to the chosen area, heaped up 
 to dry, then six weeks later the whole goes up in smoke 
 to produce a rich fertilising potash. But in all this let us 
 copy Livingstone and keep our partialities in sharp check. 
 We need never lose perspective in this forest vandalism, 
 need never forget that our own word " field " is most surely 
 only the corrupted spelling of " felled." A loud hint that 
 long ago we did the same sort of devastation with oiir axes. 
 I wonder, did we contrive to dissimulate our own corrupt 
 agricultural methods by corrupting likewise the spelling 
 of " felled " into " field " ? At any rate, in this axe- 
 madness we need not turn up too much of the white of our 
 English eyes for blacks and whites had the same tree-felling 
 start in field making. 
 
 There is method in this madness, and the idea is to grow 
 a tiny brown seed wherewith' to brew a heady beer. Thus, 
 at one stroke, the country not only goes to the Devil, but 
 
 * These two paragraphs are restored to their origiaal position in the 
 narrative. 
 
188 ALONG LONGITUDE 29° 
 
 the Devil comes into the country. Plead for manioc as 
 staple diet, and they will only laugh, and say that manioc 
 is mere food, whereas this male is beer. Heading for a 
 hamlet you conjecture that here at last you will steal one 
 calm Sunday's rest from the hot roaring week. But even 
 here beer makes bedlam. Moralise mentally if you like, 
 that Sunday is the golden clasp that binds the volume of 
 the week together, but your negro has no such idea, and, 
 of course, the " golden clasp " notion makes the row seem 
 really worse than it is. As moreover the moon is the Afri- 
 can's only candle, this roar grows wilder into the night, and 
 where is your wink of sleep in aU this ? And where is your 
 famous African blotsheet theory of sleep now ? Like a 
 sheet of blotting-paper lying between the wet pages of the 
 doings of yesterday and to-morrow, this sweet sleep was 
 going to dry up the smudges, but alas for vain metaphor ! 
 The morning sees your eyes as bleared as a boozer's. 
 I have found out that after bringing in his hot drink at 
 5 a.m. (Sunday was Livingstone's exceptional day), then 
 Majiwara was told to go back and lie down a while. Later 
 came the other hot water for his " daily " shave. And so 
 into the old grey tweed trousers, with the red-sleeved 
 waistcoat covering one of the four welcome shirts sent by 
 his daughter Agnes. How could she surmise that one of 
 these four was fated to be both shirt and shroud ? 
 
 " Keep not your kisses 
 For my cold dead hrow ; 
 The way is lonely, 
 Let me feel them now.'' 
 
 Livingstone, they tell us, was a great stickler for his 
 Sunday. When the day of rest came round he took this 
 day at its face value and, omen nomen, got twenty-four 
 hours' rest out of|the titular Day of Rest. Every cripple 
 has his way of walking and this was our old Highlander's 
 way of getting over the crust of the planet earth, one in 
 seven, please ! Sometimes circumstances were politely 
 inflexible and forced him to move even on Sunday — e.g. a 
 stretch of " hungry country " ahead, nor village nor food 
 therein. So ofi goes the Doctor grudging this breaking of 
 his Medo-Persic law : when in aU the centuries had Africa 
 
ALONG LONGITUDE 29° 189 
 
 a day of rest ? And was not that the very reason why it 
 was about time it should get a start in rescuing one day in 
 seven ? Nevertheless, before this deplorable Sunday- 
 morning move was made, he held his service by way of an 
 apologetic flourish in the face of Africa. He twinged at 
 this sort of move,.and wrote : " Obliged to travel on Sunday. 
 We had prayers before starting, but I always feel I am not 
 doing right ; it lessens the sense of obligation in the minds 
 of my companions, but I have no choice." 
 
 Hunger drove them, but all they found ahead was some 
 sour elephants' meat ; " high," he writes, " is no name 
 for its condition. It is very bitter, but we used it as a 
 relish to the maere porridge : none of the animal is wasted ; 
 skin and all is cut up and sold : not one of us would touch 
 it with the hand if we had aught else, for the gravy in which 
 we dip our porridge is Kke an aqueous solution of aloes, but 
 it prevents the heartburn, which maere causes when taken 
 alone. I take wild mushrooms boiled instead, but the 
 meat is never refused when we can purchase it, as it seems 
 to ease the feeling of fatigue which jimgle-fruit and fare 
 engender. The appetite in this country is always very 
 keen, and makes himger worse to bear : the want of salt, 
 probably, makes the gnawing sensation worse." 
 
 Our mail runner has followed us up, the herald of a noisy 
 world far away. Devouring this belated news reminds 
 us of that famous letter-bag marked " Nov. 1st, 1870 " 
 arriving with Stanley after its 365 days' delay from Zanzi- 
 bar : what did the Doctor do ? Do ? Was it even a 
 dilemma ? The living person versus the written words ? 
 Livingstone did on Tanganyika what he is doing now in 
 Heaven : the Bible he read four times in his voyage to 
 Lubaland he reads no more because the person of the 
 Living Word supplants the copy of the written Word. So 
 the Doctor kept the letter-bag on his knee and looking 
 at Stanley asked him to tell the news. " No, Doctor," 
 said he, " read your letters first, which I am sure you must 
 be impatient to read." " Ah," said Livingstone, " I have 
 waited years for letters, and I have been taught patience. 
 I can surely afford to wait a few hours longer. No, tell 
 me the general news : how is the world getting along ? " 
 
190 ALONG LONGITUDE 29° 
 
 Then it all oozed out, growing quickly into grand propor- 
 tions, into a marvellous history of deeds. Stanley the living 
 messenger found himself enacting the part of an annual 
 volume ; The Pacific EaUroad completed ; Grant, Presi- 
 dent in America ; Egypt flooded with savans ; the Cretan 
 rebellion terminated ; a Spanish revolution, Isabella 
 driven from throne ; General Prim assassinated ; Prussia 
 had humbled Denmark, annexed Schleswig-Holstein, and 
 her armies were now around Paris. 
 
CHAPTER XIV 
 THE POTENTATE PROBLEM 
 
 / may not carry my reader wholly 
 with me in the following chafter, 
 but let him remember that in these 
 matters the dead-and-gone Livingstone 
 is wholly with me. 
 
" Itis one of the great advantages of those who stand up for Christ 
 that they have the consciences even of their adversaries on their side." 
 
 '''^ If His way be our way, then His joy will be our joy." 
 
 "All the things we know about Him make us trust Him in the 
 things we do not know." 
 
CHAPTER XIV 
 THE POTENTATE PROBLEM 
 
 LOOMING unpleasantly ahead aU these days is 
 Mirambo, alias Mieremiere, the Lord Paramount 
 of Ushiland, the same who plundered the French 
 explorer and stole his iron boat in 1883. Since then no 
 white man has been allowed to approach, the land being as 
 straitly shut up as Jericho. Of course, as all the adjacent 
 country ought soon to be openiug up to our race, this 
 potentate, having blocked the road, naturally sets an over- 
 weening value on his kingship and is both inflated and 
 dangerous. It seems he has bolstered himself up with the 
 idea that as he drove off the Arabs successfully in the south- 
 west, and as Kazembe has likewise repulsed the English 
 in the north, that, therefore, he will be lord of hiU and dale 
 to the end of time. Rumour, moreover, with its thousand 
 tell-tale tongues has run on ahead and told lies about us, 
 the commonest legend being that siuce Mushidi the Great 
 in the west died from a pistol-shot, every white man carries 
 this portable death in his pocket. Is not this the very 
 reason why a white man wants to shake a chief's hand ? 
 Has he not a pistol up his sleeve ? 
 
 Finally — to your tents, Israel ! — farther back on the 
 Luapula the incipient rebellion among our men came 
 to a head : every knave of them is unduly obstinate and 
 refuses to enter Ushiland unarmed as we are. So cleverly 
 engineered was this revolt that every soul of them took 
 French leave, and here we are with our " land-ship," our 
 caravan shipwrecked in mid- Africa, if not mid-ocean. The 
 old story : where there is a will there is a way in Africa, 
 but where there are many wiUs there is no way. Without 
 a qualm, these hare-hearted negroes propose to desert 
 us in a foreign land, their argument being that our errand 
 
 13 193 
 
194 THE POTENTATE PROBLEM 
 
 is too quixotic to be of any use- to either God or man. Wliy 
 die for a fool's phantasy ? In an African caravan of 
 exploration there is always a sprinkling of temporisers and 
 timids, men who in your hour of trial become the little 
 leaven that leaveneth the whole lump. But speaking 
 generally, these blacks of ours, after having gone into 
 committee on the subject of retreat, make three sects of it, 
 the only three in all the world : The won'ts. The don'ts and 
 The can'ts. Only three ways, wanton ways, of spelling 
 the negro negative. The nasty bit about it is that this 
 seems an invitation from our own men to the aborigines 
 hemming us in — to gobble us up. 
 
 As it is these latter are getting very nasty, the commonest 
 type of enemy being a chief's son surrounded by a knot of 
 slaves, who takes advantage of our thus being knee- 
 deep in perplexity to insult us openly. Oh ! if only 
 Kazembe had not driven back the English, things would 
 have been softer. This is their way of beating the tom-tom 
 of " property-in-danger," the idea being that their country 
 will be stolen by the advancing whites : " Impanga yesu ! " 
 (" our fatherland ") is their cry. This, of course, is not quite 
 the case, but it is so nearly the case that we are banhnipt 
 in argument, e.g. did not " Missionary " Livingstone wear 
 a Consul's cap ? Probably they are right and we are the 
 thin edge of God's great wedge. 
 
 A Missionary told me quite sketchily, as I was entering 
 Africa, that, reaUy, as the Bible was so very much about 
 one people — the Jews ; and as, moreover, these Hebrews, 
 unlike the African, had a written Bible to quote from, that, 
 therefore, we could find very little in the Bible appropriate 
 to the case of a raw African. For what Bible has he, what 
 but the mere customs of his forefathers ? Where then 
 could we quote from ? The answer to this curiously 
 benighted objection is found in the simplest known state- 
 ment of our message, a message seen at a glance to be 
 identical for Jew and negro alike. For did not Christ 
 redeem us all — black and white, Jew and Gentile, from the 
 vain conversation received by tradition from our forefathers ? 
 All day, every day across broad Africa, this is as precisely 
 the bone of contention with the African as it was long ago 
 
TWO OLD JJECAYEIJ IXDUSTIilES: IIOE SMELTIXO AND f'OTToK 
 
 SPINNING. 
 
 194] 
 
THE POTENTATE PROBLEM 195 
 
 in Judea : The Word versus this vain conversation received 
 by tradition from their forefathers. The issue, I urge, is 
 identical. Like a dam of rocks, relentlessly solid, this 
 barrier stretches across the world and centuries, to wit, the 
 traditions of the elders blocking the advance of salvation. 
 These murdered Christ long ago, these to-day form the 
 normal and incidental enemy of Christ in Africa. Thus 
 the Jews and negro are so absolutely one in the rejection 
 of salvation that Paul declares both Hebrews and Heathen 
 to be under Law. 
 
 The farther south we " bore " (sava) the tribal grumbling 
 gains in volume. But, like Livingstone, we piUow our 
 heads on the old saying : Leave to-morrow's trouble to 
 to-morrow's strength ; to-morrow's work to to-morrow's 
 time ; to-morrow's trial to to-morrow's grace — and to- 
 morrow's God. They object to our speed : Livingstone 
 went slowly, why not we, his brother and sister ? Those 
 who blame him. for failing to make more than five miles a 
 day often forget that in these early days of exploration 
 there is no fulsome subserviency about the old road- 
 blocMng chiefs, Kazembe & Co. Every mere explorer or 
 missionary is only out to spy the nakedness of the land. 
 Be a slaver ; be an ivory trader ; be something with a 
 tangible raison (^'eire; but what does all this mooning around 
 the country measuring rivers mean ? " You are stealing 
 the land on paper first of all, and then you will actually 
 annex it afterwards." Nevertheless as the sanctity of a 
 grave in Africa supersedes all things, we, whose only objec- 
 tive is to reach Livingstone's grave, we verily can boast 
 the premier passport of all Africa. Are we intriguing 
 south ? This we flourish in their face even although the 
 British have drawn first blood behind our back — a grave is 
 a grave subject indeed. Our venture is really an adventure 
 and the latter is what fresh air is to a slum child : wild 
 horses will not drag us back if only to prove that the 
 Missionary cause isnot an absurd attempt to put old women's 
 heads on young men's shoulders. To be on Livingstone's 
 trail is glorious : it may mean an odd fever, but it also feels 
 very much like getting up in the country at six in the morn- 
 ing to drink milk from the cow. Never a prospector has 
 
196 THE POTENTATE PROBLEM 
 
 been here since lie died, never a trader, and the Government 
 will only follow in our steps to ignore our priority with, civil 
 insolence and well-bred contempt. 
 
 Livingstone was too much of a philosopher to break into 
 a whirlwind of ferocity because these old sons of Belial 
 refused him right-of-way along their rivers. Why be angry 
 with them when he himself had been forbidden the banks 
 of his own Eiver Clyde when a boy ? The son of Sirach 
 said " all things are double," and one suspects Livingstone 
 put a double dig in his meaning when he first sighted the 
 Kasai River and thought it " looked like the Clyde." The 
 Scotch Clyde like the African Kasai had many a no-passage- 
 this-way barrier in the dead old days of Livingstone's 
 boyhood. I have just chanced on this new, quite new, bit 
 of his early history. Apiece with David and his young 
 brother Charlie poaching salmon, and Charlie slipping 
 the fish inside his trousers to simulate " swollen leg," take 
 this other Clyde = Kasai incident. He never lost perspec- 
 tive ; never forgot the hole of the pit from whence he had 
 been digged ; never ignored the fact that only the other day 
 we in England hanged a mere boy for stealing one shilling 
 and threepence. And who ever in broad Africa was made 
 a criminal for poaching " God's fish " as they call them ? 
 f Rankin, his old boy-mate, tells of how they were both 
 piecers to the same spinner, David, being of a pensive 
 bent, at Is. per day. Then came the riverine trouble that 
 long after was to be re-enacted many a time in Africa. Let 
 Rankin, the " wee piecer," tell the tale of his chum David. 
 " The proprietors of Blantyre cotton mill," says he, " as- 
 sumed Potentate power over their employees, even in 
 non- working hours." Which they had no shadow of right 
 to do, except by an unjust law of their own making. They 
 interdicted their employees from walking on the bonnie 
 banks of Clyde at the back of their works ; a great grievance 
 this to the workers, more especially on fine summer evenings. 
 However, " a man's a man for 'a that," and notwith- 
 standing these unjustifiable orders they, in those far pre- 
 Union days, were often violated by one and another. 
 Latterly, these economic Czars of Blantyre determined to 
 make an example of some of them by fine or dismissal, 
 
THE POTENTATE PROBLEM 197 
 
 and our St. David happened to be the fibrst victim who fell 
 to the first buUet. He was caught by the manager " red- 
 handed " taking his stroll one fine evening with his book of 
 travels in his hand, which was his wont to do. Court- 
 martial on the following forenoon before one of the masters 
 in the countiug-house. Judgment : young D. L. must pay 
 a fine of £2 or lose his work. " Master," he replied, 
 " I prefer leaving at once : what right would my parents 
 have to pay this unjust fine for me ? I did no wrong of any 
 kind ; the banks of Clyde are not yours in any view of the 
 matter; they have belonged to the public since time 
 immemorial, and as long as I remain in Blantyre I wiU take 
 my stroll on the bonnie banks of Clyde just as it suits me ; 
 and though you are unjustly putting me out of my work, 
 there is a just God above who sees all our actions, whether 
 good or bad, and we shall be dealt with accordingly. I 
 am young, the world is wide ; and you are perhaps doiag 
 me a good turn ; it is quite possible and probable also, I 
 may perhaps have a chance yet of seeing a good bit of the 
 world, which I never could by remaitung in your cotton 
 mill under petty tyrants." 
 
 This suddenly settled the question : off went David, got 
 whatever trifles were due, put on his jacket, and left the 
 place quite imiconcemed — for a thousand Clydes were far 
 away, and calUng. All this recalls one of his dying 
 phrases when in the old mist of misunderstanding he opined 
 he had struck in these marshes the fountains of the Nile : 
 " Apparently," writes he, " here is the Nile enacting its 
 inundations even at its sources." A true tag these italics 
 make to John Rankin's tale of Livingstone's boyhood : 
 as then at his boyhood Clyde, his source, so here at the end 
 on these Africanrivers,he had the same no-passage-this-way 
 enactments : they were his NUe, and whether at life's source 
 or delta Livingstone was in for riverine trouble ! A river 
 dismissed him in his Blantyre boyhood, and at the end it 
 was a river that did for him. 
 
 Therefore do not be too hard on these real chiefs who block 
 our way as they did Livingstone's. There is some slum- 
 bering nobleness in the idea : did not Cicero say that the 
 Latin hostis, an enemy, meant at first the same sort of 
 
198 THE POTENTATE PROBLEM 
 
 idea as feregrinus, a pilgrim, an incomer ? These are not 
 lands in which, you come thousands of miles merely to leave 
 your card on any man. And here was Livingstone 
 leaving both his bones and his card, the latter carved up 
 on a Mupundu tree by his boys. 
 
 To local fooleries there is no end, and there is quite a 
 wrangle going on that has come to blows, aU because one 
 black Monsieur stood on another's shadow. Is not the 
 shadow the primal part of man, the man ? This means, 
 that, unlike ourselves who only claim a modest space for a 
 footing on the soil, these arrogants claim double place for 
 big feet and bigger shadow. Their idea about the shadow 
 is that a man in robust health is supposed to cast a black 
 sharp one, whereas a weak man casts only a faint shadow 
 on the ground. So hard-mouthed are they on this subject 
 that they push their theory right into the death-chamber, 
 all agreeing that a dead man has no shadow. Confronted 
 in Bunheya by heaps of skulls all bleaching in the sun, all 
 casting as many shadows as skuUs, they wriggled out of it 
 by saying that the word for " shadow " is the word for 
 " spirit," and as the spirits are only " the shadows," 
 therefore a dead man can have no shadow. After this, 
 who will deny that the negro is not an etymologist ? 
 Another Plato link this, for does not Socrates contend that 
 things have names by nature 1 
 
 This is the great reason why a normal negro objects to 
 be photographed ; a man's photo is called his shadow and 
 to steal his shadow is obviously to steal his spirit, to steal 
 the real inner man. No mere crotchet this ; there is a 
 specific verb, Kushendula = to steal one's shadow, the 
 photographer's title being the shadow-stealer. A Kodak 
 with its nozzle of a lens is therefore really a polite revolver. 
 The negro's form flashes across the " finder " of the instru- 
 ment, cUck ! goes the shutter, and at that moment some- 
 thing is simultaneously supposed to snap in the negro's 
 internal regions. The curious idea about all these spirits, 
 too, is that there is cleavage between them, and Kalunga, or 
 Kumbo, " the Spirit World," is composed of two rival 
 camps named titularily : the Spirits of the Right Hand, 
 and the Spirits of the Left. Why is it that even in the far 
 
THE POTENTATE PROBLEM 199 
 
 black busli, good = the right hand, and evil = the left ? 
 Again and again, they equate " sorrow " = " the left 
 hand," and the question is a fair one whether we have not 
 altogether missed Jacob's point when he called his youngest 
 Benjamin or " Son of the right hand." RacheFs phrase, 
 " Ben-oni " = Son of my sorrow," would be rendered 
 " Son of my left hand " and surely there is an intentional 
 word-play here, the mother moaning out the black side 
 and the father the bright : " Son of my left hand " she ; 
 " Son of the right hand " he. 
 
 On quizzing these funny folks, I found a whole group of 
 them, named after rocks and stones. A sort of deputation, 
 I suppose, sent in by Geology to listen for half a week to 
 Theology, Mr. Granite and Mr. Sandstone, accompanied by 
 Mr. Limestone and Mr. Freestone and aU the dear little 
 chucky stones. " Peter " {Dibwe) is a fairly common stone- 
 name in the whole district. So here is another rebuke to 
 our impatience : is not geology the key to the patience of 
 God 1 And although these negroes have hearts of stone 
 as well as names of stone, yet can Livingstone's God make 
 them Living stones. This, in fact, is the very hope shut 
 up in one of these strange stone-names, Mankole or Mr. 
 Laterite. They argue it is a bastard ironstone, the sure 
 promise of real ore deeper down. Geologically, it is really 
 a baked crust of rock due to sunlight, the carbonic acid of 
 rain-water and iron salts combining with the underlying 
 rock to form a shell which resists denudation. And here 
 is a young Hopeful, saying, " I am Mr. Laterite, a bastard 
 ore in my surface outcrop, but dig deeper into me and oh ! 
 yes, there you find the real ore ! " Yet Fleet Street says 
 this Africa of ours has no future ! 
 
 This mention of names reminds me of an amusing phase 
 in our adventure. The farther our men from the north 
 penetrate south, the more they begin to adopt new names, 
 name of town or name of river. This new alias seems to 
 be a verbal swagger and he is going to flaunt it to the far- 
 away stay-at-homes when he gets back. He has got half 
 a dozen such aliases already, but the farther he goes south 
 the more certain it is that in this matter of names he will 
 be ofi with the old love and on with the new. The new 
 
200 THE POTENTATE PROBLEM 
 
 name is supposed to symboUse some new change of nature, 
 but h.ow can change of chmate cause change of character 1 
 Do not the old Aberdeen fisherfolk say, '' New boats but 
 old rocks " 1 In the same way, Livingstone's men troubled 
 him by changing their names, but he was good-natured 
 enough to remember that his family used to be called 
 " McLay " but changed their old northern name to the 
 eleven-letter " Livingstone." 
 
 The long grass will soon be ablaze, and then it is you see 
 how this Africa of ours has somewhere secreted in its com- 
 position a strong sense of the dramatic, At the end of 
 every year these millions of miles of long grass go up in 
 smoke as a sort of spring-cleaning for the land. Listening 
 to a Government official out west as he sternly charged a 
 chief to forbid these annual fires, I saw the poor man was 
 incredulously bewildered : did that chief wink, or did I 
 only imagine it ? A few days passed and that wink 
 justified itself : out on the skyline, huge volcanoes of smoke 
 were advanciag, and that, too, in the teeth of this red-tape 
 command to the contrary. The chief dragged in as sus- 
 pected culprit was accused of law-breaking, but, " Don't 
 blame me,'' said he with a tantalising twinkle, " blame God, 
 for HE can light His own fixes without a man's help." 
 Then came the belated explanation that " God " (it is 
 always " God " with them) " descends on the great plains 
 in the lightning and kindles His own sanitary blaze : 
 " He grew His own grass and bums it Himself." 
 
 This same chief proceeded to protest against the white 
 man's cast-iron mode of legislation, and pleaded for some 
 elasticity of law. " Is not Africa a land of farmers," said 
 he, " and is there not a persistent ebb and flow of feast and 
 famine in the agricultural returns 1 Why then be wiser 
 than God 1 " Of course, as Tax Collector, the orderly 
 official could only rejoin that ebb and flow in his schedule 
 of receipts would mean dismissal : the seasons could be 
 spasmodic, but he, never. Then it was the black philo- 
 sopher proved his right to sit in Parliament by the clever 
 sarcasm : " Yes ; when God twisted out His rivers so 
 ' serpentine ' [bunyoka] and covered the land with their 
 twisting flow. He seemingly did not ask the white man's 
 
THE POTENTATE PROBLEM 201 
 
 advice. No, for tlie wliite man would have told God ixt 
 make them straight ! " This is an African's stab at our cast- 
 iron methods of civilisation in which nature is measured with 
 a foot-rule, dictated to Hke a poodle-dog. No doubt, this 
 negro satire is genial, but it gets home on our weaknesses. 
 Watch how these ugly old blacks will neither temporise 
 nor tamper with the idea of God being over all in His own 
 world : even the word " climate " he avoids, and in its 
 place will substitute the Creator's name. Even a Mission- 
 ary bravely battling against African cUmate is told by his 
 pot-black brother that he is " fighting God " (i.e. climate). 
 
 The uncanny thing is that all over they know the name 
 of " God " but never hint the personality of the Devil : 
 be it evil or good, it is aU " God " this, " God " that. 
 Ralph Erskine builded better than he knew when he said 
 " There is no devil so had as no devil." Here he hits the 
 African nail hard on the head ; this is the first and last of 
 all our trials, a vast contiaent fuU of devilish deeds yet no 
 devil : the satanic enemy of souls unknown and therefore 
 unnamed. There is deceit but no deceiver ; evil every- 
 where, but no evil one. True for you, Ralph Erskine, 
 " There is no devil so bad as no devil." 
 
 Here near the feeders of the Zambezi a good example of 
 this occurred when a poor man drove in a cow one morning 
 for sale. This initial purchase being successful, soon quite 
 a cattle market was opened, sundown seeing us with a 
 fine show of stock. But here came the poser ; stretching 
 far north along our return route was many a belt of 
 m/yrsitans, the cattle-kiLLing fly, and the problem stands how 
 to get our troop of oxen through these menacing tsetse. 
 This the quaint old chief promised to do, so he " raised up " 
 an expert to see us north, a weird old African veterinary 
 surgeon this. Watch his curious solution, half medicine, 
 half magic. Night after night on the northward march, 
 he makes a decoction of herbs and sprinkles it over the 
 herd, then after each application he caps the climax with 
 a droll speech. Before we turn in, with the certainty of 
 a gramophone, he treats us to the same old anti-tsetse 
 curtain-lecture each night. Thus : "Ye have heard it 
 said that a certain deadly-to-oxen fly exists, Kazembe 
 
202 THE POTENTATE PROBLEM 
 
 the name — ^but I hereby declare that (ahem !) the said 
 fly is now to be reckoned non-existent. No longer is 
 such a name to be in our vocabulary, a new name I give 
 it, L/ake let it be called ; old things are passed away, 
 behold all things are become new, for this new name of 
 Luke will surely mahe a new -fly of him." 
 
 How like many a good Britisher who calls Hell by the 
 politer name of Hades, and thinks he has thereby put the 
 fire out ! The efirontery of the tragic thing, Africa, Satan's 
 head-quarters, with no Devil at all ! Like the Christian 
 Scientist doctor who claimed to have cured Mark Twain's 
 broken bones with imaginary surgery : " Oh, no," said the 
 C. S. specialist, " the fractures were merely imaginary 
 and the Alpine fall did no harm." But when this charlatan 
 presented Mark with a heavy doctor's bill for treatment 
 by imaginary surgery, Mr. Twain twinkled with pleasure 
 at the huge sum demanded and — at once issued an 
 imaginary cheque in payment ! Invisible surgery should 
 be paid for with invisible money : " No rain, no mush- 
 rooms," is the African's way of insisting that every effect 
 must have a cause ; " no cure, no cheque," laughed Mr. 
 Twain. The end of all this " no Devil " deceit came like 
 a flash of lightning when we merely and mildly introduced 
 the name of their continental Enemy. Like one lighted 
 brand thrown into the long grass, away went the name and 
 nature of " Satana " like a roaring fire foretelling the other 
 and final fire of Eternity. Yet, after all, how stupid that 
 surprise of ours at finding no name of Satan here in his own 
 hunting-grounds. For is he not a fallen Angel, by name 
 Diaholus, and if they do not know the name of Gabriel, 
 an unfallen archangel, why expect them to know the name 
 of this fallen one ? 
 
CHAPTER XV 
 THE ROAD-BLOCKEE, 
 
 Precisely as the old Physicians could, 
 tell by the patient's tongue the state 
 of his health, so with the African's 
 tongue in the linguistic sense. It is the 
 tell-tale negro tongue that declares his 
 moral diagnosis, and a foul mouth means 
 a foul man. 
 
" To make the loss the more galling, they took what we could least 
 spare — the medicine-box, which they would only throw away as soon 
 as they came to examine their booty." 
 
 " I felt as if I had now received the sentence of death, like poor 
 Bishop Mackenzie." 
 
 " Everything of this kind happens by the permission of One 
 who watches over us with most tender care ; and this may turn out for 
 the best by taking away a source of suspicion among more superstitious, 
 charm-dreading people further north. I meant it as a source of 
 benefit to my party and to the heathen." 
 
 "It is difficult to say from the heart, ' Thy will be done ' ; but 
 I shall try." 
 
 Livingstone. 
 
CHAPTER XV 
 THE ROAD-BLOCKER 
 
 WE are now in July — the 5th to be exact — and our 
 guides declare a halt, speaking most mysteri- 
 ously, most conflictingly as to the whereabouts of 
 the phantom Lord Paramount. It transpires he is raiding 
 his own outlying villages, the Ushi mode of tax-coUecting 
 this. FitiaUy, at nightfall, our own heralds come with the 
 wondrous news that he was seen of them in a camp beyond 
 Maansa, and that he has appointed a rendezvous two days 
 south, to which point he will march, arriving simultaneously 
 with ourselves. Thence, the programme runs that he 
 conducts us south for three days to his old town, bear-on-a- 
 chain fashion. He said bluntly to my boys that white men 
 were frightened of him ; witness their having left him alone 
 all these years after his plundering Giraud. Meantime, 
 we are invited to believe that this gad-about king has the 
 gift of ubiquity, that he is planning a thousand counter- 
 strokes, that he has had scouts far out on the road to size us 
 up, and that once he himself actually lay in ambush to the 
 left of the trail peering out of the grass on us passing. 
 When oh ! and how oh ! will this hideous game of hide- 
 and-seek end ? 
 
 Frontiers as presently existing are no real guide to the 
 extent of a tribe, for the tribal division is some totem or 
 tribal badge, called Bukoka (mukoa), which federalises 
 (with right-thinking folk) all who claim it. Therefore the 
 " Sons of the Lion " are a imity, though separated by several 
 degrees of latitude ; ditto the " Sons of the Clay," the " Sons 
 of the Rain," and so on, right round nature, excepting 
 always the sun, moon and stars — the sun, moon and stars, 
 s'il vous plait. 
 
 Here in the wilds the day's panorama of Livingstone's 
 
 205 
 
206 THE ROAD-BLOCKER 
 
 travel exactly corresponds to that other map of his soul's 
 itinerary for the day. One phase sees him breasting a 
 hill, the next alternates him down into the vaUey, then 
 comes the inevitable river with the triple problem of where, 
 when, how to cross. These days the rivers are all mad, 
 have burst their banks and even the strongest bridges are 
 swept away. On approaching the Mufufushi I guessed 
 trouble ahead in the initial demand to wade hundreds of 
 yards waist deep in water before even the submerged banks 
 were reached. Then it was the last appearance of plausi- 
 bility vanished, for the flood had done its worst, leaving 
 nor bridge nor hope for crossing. And must we sleep in the 
 cheerless forest waiting for the subsiding stream ? Not 
 a bit of it. The Angels of God (there they are again !), 
 yes, those Angels, the Royal Engineers of Heaven, bridged 
 the gulf before my eyes. For what do you think ? The 
 same flood that destroyed the bridge is now swirling round 
 the roots of a famous tree, a tree hundreds of years old, 
 growing on the bank. Many a flood so attacked it in the 
 past, and the river lost the battle ; year after year the great 
 tree stood strong. You, my reader, can shrug a doubtful, 
 though indulgent shoulder if you care to — ^but, I say, let 
 the Angels finish this story, please. Truth to teU, the very 
 flood that swept away the old bridge is now going to give 
 us a better one. The end of all things has come at last, 
 the long-defeated river wins the day and crash ! falls that 
 giant tree right across the river, bridging it automatically 
 as never engineer could dare do. Can you blame us, 
 pace Pecksnifi, for politely raising our voice half an octave 
 in a joyous cry of thanksgiving ? 
 
 But there is a " per contra a/c " to aU this. Our new 
 Luanza bridge went in the great storm, or shall I not rather 
 put it, the new storm and the great bridge 1 For never did 
 such a tornado sweep down from the mountaius, and never 
 before did we build such a bridge as that. Much labour 
 went into it, much money, much prayer : the Government 
 publicly congratulated, and hundreds blessed God and us 
 for all that bridge meant to the traveller whose terror of 
 anticipation is how to cross the foaming rivers that lie 
 ahead. Then came this record storm to test and tear 
 
THE ROAD-BLOCKER 207 
 
 to pieces this record bridge, a wild down-rush of wind and 
 water when the river leapt its old bed and rushed down 
 uprootiug great trees in one sucking swirl. But even then 
 we would have won the fight but for the following funny 
 fact : the river was rogue enough to know he could not 
 wash our work away, hence his actually arming himself for 
 the fight. Tearing up the trees lining the banks, on he 
 came like an armed man flaunting these weapons of wood. 
 It was this battering-ram business did it, and thus we come 
 to the old saw, " Man plans — God spans." So there you 
 have old Africa at its usual uncompromising attempt to clear 
 us out of the country : first it was the fire that burnt us out, 
 and here comes his great confrere, water, trying to get at 
 us by a flank movement. But the young Christians get 
 a sermon out of it, and one old man preached a most 
 searching message on the mutations of aU earthly things, 
 and how all must pass away that the things that can- 
 not be moved should appear. His text was that old 
 Africanism, " This world is only a bridge we are passing 
 over," and, said he, " if the world, biggest bridge of all, 
 passes away, why not these tiny toy bridges of ours 
 likewise ? " 
 
 Have struck it strong at last. On the 9th, out from the 
 grass springs the great man precisely as though he were 
 shot out of a catapult. This Mieremiere, alias Mirambo, 
 is a middle-aged man, clean-shaven and shrewd. Another 
 rotten old rex, whose glazed eyes, enamel skin tell of hemp 
 slavery. Moses " wist not that his face shone," and here 
 is another who wists not his is shining — for the Devil. 
 After every smoke he smacks his lips, calls it honey, but 
 he himself will tell you that he is licking his honey from a 
 very sharp knife that makes his lips bleed every time. His 
 hemp pipe is a huge goujd-thing bulging out like a water- 
 jar, and this he pats pettingly the way a child strokes the 
 coat of a cat. 
 
 This, then, as he bumptiously told us, is the central figure 
 of Ushiland, the Sacred stone, known all over the land by 
 the name of " Makumba," being in his possession. Throw 
 beads upon this stone and they will stick to it, yea, blessed 
 is the man called upon to be its bearer during any occasion 
 
208 THE ROAD-BLOCKER 
 
 of removal. All hia " Tom Touchy " litigation, however 
 false, will be successful. Mirambo, beiag custodian of 
 tMs infallible oracle, has therefore a far safer seat than any 
 of his compeers, for in Africa no roots go so deep as those 
 of superstitution. The visible and tangible pall on the 
 taste ; not so the unseen and mysterious. With a com- 
 mercial instinct quite in accord with the best traditions 
 of priestcraft, they make cash out of all this — to capitalise 
 the credulity of the negro is the safest source of revenue 
 in broad Africa. Hence Makumba has become a huge 
 religious " penny-in- the- slot " machine with a whole 
 staff of officials who " eat Makumba " as a profession, and 
 for us to preach a salvation " without money and without 
 price " is a degradation. So ingrained is this £ s. d. idea of 
 religion that you can see a literal catch-penny device 
 from Africa in the British Museum, a pious contrivance this, 
 thousands of years old. There you see those African 
 priests artfully formed some earthen vessels so as to 
 dribble out holy water to those who slip a certain-sized 
 coin in the slot. And all this, not hundreds but thousands 
 of years ago. 
 
 This Mirambo — ^to give him his snob-name — is perfectly 
 inflated with the idea of his " Emperorship," and delights 
 in moving over the country confiscating other men's belong- 
 ings. His unique mode of making magnificoes like Chinama 
 and Kalasa pay up tribute is characteristic of the man. 
 Messengers beard these lions in their den, placing mutely 
 on the ground an old bow and arrow, relic of the ancient 
 lords of UsMland. This is an exalted and touching proof 
 of loyalty and at once these " children of the past " capi- 
 tulate. But as whispers come in from the outer 'world of 
 a more humane mode of life, Mirambo increases his bribe 
 to his warriors ; not a bribe in money or kind, but of 
 increased licence to loot, which means a fall in the weather- 
 glass and stormier times ahead. Here then is precisely 
 a regime that puritans of the Commonwealth would have 
 rejoiced to exterminate, in fellowship with God, according 
 to their thought. But our call is to another and higher 
 fellowship which practically makes us knaves and cowards 
 in the African's eyes. Livingstone's Lord and Forerunner 
 
3*5"'f> 
 
 3 
 
 
THE ROAD-BLOCKER 209 
 
 was hurried out of the world ignominiously at an early age 
 — (1) " No room for Him in the inn " ; anon (2) no room for 
 Him in His own Palestine ; soon (3) no room for Him in 
 the world ! and our call is to the fellowship of that Son who 
 was cast out of the vineyard. Meantime, here is Mirambo 
 beaming at us, and saying " Welcome I " And strange 
 to say I could detail little local items that go to show how 
 The Omnipotent is doing double duty all the time : on the 
 outside of the door turns the key ; in the inside oils the 
 lock into obedience. 
 
 Mieremiere still coming out of his shell and appeariag 
 in the role of traveller. Seems painfully anxious to pose 
 as first class in everything, all his remarks couched in an 
 I'm-clever-do-you-foUow-me ? sort of challenge. With 
 eyes fastened on us like gimlets he is not at all sure of our 
 sincerity, and denies point-blank we have only come to 
 preach : as for " mere " preaching {cha fye !), he tells 
 us to preach away, what harm can it do ? Are not a 
 farthing candle and a green log safe companions ? He was 
 at our camp betimes, and intends conducting us through 
 Ushiland in person. His party took the lead, flying a 
 couple of flags, H.R.H., gun on shoulder, jumping 
 through a marsh occasionally, quite briskly, and we Imow 
 when a village is ahead by hearing the '' royal salute " going 
 up at the chief's approach. The Arabs, he tells us, have 
 treated him badly, looting his capital on the Luela River, 
 but of course he made reprisal, raised the Ushi chiefs and 
 drove them out. This brisk tramping across country of his 
 to-day is to show us that he is a man, albeit a potentate, and 
 is a delightful anti-pomp demonstration. He has received 
 no white man since Giraud : says that our coming heralds 
 a new epoch, and somehow we feel it deeply after a fashion. 
 Oh, for sixty brave Missionaries to line out along this 
 peninsula.' 
 
 Convalescing from a wild booze, our Mieremiere is 
 now bringing up the rear ; has put up at one of his depend- 
 
 ^ Since then the Mofiats and Wilsons (Livingstone's own blood) have 
 occupied Ilala, the Sims Fort Rosebery ; the Universities Mission at Chilikwa ; 
 the Lammonds at Kaleba and the L.M.S, at Mbereshi. All in a straight line 
 towards the south. 
 
 14 
 
210 THE ROAD-BLOCKER 
 
 encies for more beer. The aloes are all out in bloom, 
 " hanging out their golden bells, to mingle glory with 
 corruption," And the streams crossed all cold, callously 
 cold, making even our Africans shriek. We are now at 
 Kumbura's, a bi-Ungual village on the Lukulashi, the last 
 Yeke stronghold in these parts and a reminder that even 
 all about here the old Mushidi had his garrisons. Miere- 
 miere, too, went west and paid homage to him, receiving 
 on that ocasion the omande shell imitation, and the new 
 Grand Duke name, Mirambo. But Ushiland quickly 
 threw ofi allegiance ; drove the garrisons back on us in 
 Bunkeya, only this one having been spared, and that 
 because long ago it was leavened by Ushi people ; the chief 
 as glib in the one language as the other. 
 
 The potentate leads the way to-day, robed in white, with 
 red turban : a bit of soap he begged yesterday brought 
 about the transformation. His plan is to reach his town 
 on the Luela at midnight, climbing the stockade to catch 
 " conjugal " criminals. The most awe-inspiring bit of his 
 luggage is the sheaf of old bows belonging to the previous 
 chiefs of his djniasty. There are nine all told, and when 
 they pass it is not lawful to say, " There pass the nine 
 bows," but, " There pass the nine kings ! " On Miere- 
 miere's death (and who dare name or hint thereat ?) a tenth 
 bow will be added. The morning sees this royal fellow- 
 traveller of ours a very smart and sensible man, but as the 
 sun mounts the sky, the beer he is boozing also mounts to 
 his head and makes him reckless, even dangerous. It is 
 difficult to string into a coherent whole the mutterings of 
 this scoundrel : in vino Veritas, however, and here are some 
 of the sentences the beer brings out. Cogitatingly : ' ' Well, 
 I am a fool, showing people through my own country, 
 which they are going to seize." Abruptly : " Look over 
 there at Chivala, the Arab ; since he defeated the Belgians 
 he has been manufacturing wooden shackles in which to 
 imprison you white men." Still in his best moment he 
 remembers courtesy, and moves ofi the path to let us pass ! 
 Even in the matter of a dose of medicine, this silly chief 
 must certify his priority of status by taking two pUls for 
 his slave's one. Why be biggest man in town if you do 
 
THE ROAD-BLOCKER 211 
 
 not swallow the biggest doctor's dose ? Does this not also 
 announce that the chief when sick is doubly so, hence the 
 double demand for fuss and jBlm-flam ? Like the old days 
 in Russia when one tear in the Czar's eye cost a thousand 
 pocket-handkerchiefs ! 
 
CHAPTEE XVI 
 MORE OF IT 
 
 This chapter is dedicated to the memory 
 of the farmer who went to market so 
 extremely anxious not to he cheated, 
 that a philosopher told him when he 
 became just as anxious not to cheat 
 anybody else his market waggon would 
 he as noble as the chariot of the sun I 
 
" Nothing is done while anything remains to be done." 
 
 Julius Caesar. 
 
 " If you set out on a journey often miles, remember that nine miles 
 is only half-way," 
 
 Chinese Proverb. 
 
 " I have finished the work that Thou gavest Me to do." 
 
 N.T. 
 
 " But I'll tell you this : a middlin' doctor is a pore thing, and a 
 middlin' lawyer is a pore thing, but keep me from a middlin' man of 
 God." 
 
 Owen Meston. 
 
CHAPTER XVI 
 MORE OF IT 
 
 NUMBERS of cropped ears tell the tale that the 
 local law-breaker was taken out to the cross- 
 roads where ,_he literally lost the ears he had 
 already metaphorically lost long ago in " won't listen " 
 = lawlessness. This subtle symbolism of cross-roads and 
 cropped ears is a serious concern and shows much moral 
 penetration : the cross-roads as place of execution signify 
 that the criminal has crossed his rebel will (= " path ") 
 with that of the sober will (= " path ") of the commimity. 
 This cross-road symbolism is only the first phase, though, 
 and the second ? This, tremendously this : why not 
 crop the ears, for are they not "irrepressible," only 
 cartilage, so that if you bend the ear forward by force, 
 when the finger pressure is released — ^presto ! — does it not 
 spring back to the old irrepressible position ? Here, then, 
 is the key to thek ear-cropping symbol : this refusal of the 
 human ear to bend-and-keep-bent without pressure (unlike 
 the obedient finger or leg, for instance). This is held to 
 typify human incorrigibility and rebellion. Ku twala 
 matwi ku petame ? is their reminder that the wobbly ear is 
 only cartilage, will not, cannot, lie down submissively; 
 miist be bent down and kept down, thus most surely sym- 
 bolises its sort of " I will not listen " kind of attitude to 
 life. Hence the cropping of the same is supposed to cure 
 both such sorts of cockiness, literal and moral. 
 
 But do not let us substitute one exaggeration for another. 
 The burning of witches is in full blast in all these territories, 
 yet, be it Avizard or witch, the case is perhaps generally an 
 affair of some local recalcitrant who dabbles in the black 
 art. Had, therefore, both the desire and design of murder. 
 To sniff at it all as " Salem superstition " does not face and 
 
 216 
 
216 MORE OF IT 
 
 finisli the fact that the accused did so plot murder ; did, 
 perhaps, even procure poison to finish the victim ofE. But 
 even granting the actual potion is non est, all the stiug of 
 your civilised indignation is neutralised in the dead-sure 
 knowledge that these very objects of your pity generally 
 indulge in and confess to such secret malignity. In other 
 words : (1) If a tribe or town has so many of these anti- 
 pathetic temperaments, then (2) their so crossing the tribal 
 wiU amounts to abnormal aberration — against, always 
 against popular persons or precedents, which means that 
 (3) this " rebellion is as the sin of witchcraft," so you reach 
 the same result by another road. 
 
 All this I discovered on the roaring day when they were 
 leading out one such woman to die, Muviaga by name. My 
 mind ablaze with the memory of those nineteen hanged at 
 Salem, I rushed out to the rescue, when lo, here was my lady 
 giving me cheaply away in a concise confession that poison 
 was her trade, and that many a one she had made away with. 
 Then I thought again of Salem, this time not of the nineteen 
 hanged but of the fifty who were pardoned on their con- 
 fessing to such a calling. Let not the reader of these lines, 
 therefore, bridle at my unmitigated manner. The Mosaic 
 economy did ordain the death of all such. And, mark you, 
 in the same Samuel where Saul did call up the dead, there 
 it is, in this same Samuel, the whole thing is modernised 
 in the easy explanation, " rebellion is as the sin of witch- 
 craft." At secret war with their kind, designing their 
 death by subterranean sublety, what sort of rebellion 
 could equal such ? Kemember, in a certain sense, in 
 judging of Africa one must use African weights and mea- 
 sures. The figure " 3 " is a recurring decimal though 
 you write it for a million years, and so is " No. I " first, 
 last, all the time, in all lands. Thus when this impudent 
 human numeral forgets the other co-occupants of the same 
 town, remembers tL^m, rather, only to malignantly plan 
 to murder them, really this it is that makes you go to the 
 '' rebellion is as the sin of the witchcraft " source of all 
 that tends to make, and ends in making, a witch or wizard. 
 
 A man to-day kept strumming a native guitar, but there 
 was method in his madness for he was " a freemason " 
 
MORE OF IT 217 
 
 (mutwa) and this " password-song " was code telegram to 
 the town that the oneness of all vatwa endorsed his claim 
 for free bed and board. " To die hvAwa " is the official 
 phrase of their cult, and this " dying " gives them bac- 
 chantic authority to annul all the sanctities of sex, 
 married women and maidens being shut up in this Satanic 
 club-house where an orgy of licentiousness runs riot. This 
 frenzy is fed by a drug that swoons them into a stupor 
 when they " speak with tongues " and finally fall into a 
 trance. This is the " dying hutwa " of their rite, and on 
 reviving each neophyte gets a new name for the new life 
 now entered upon. They even speak a new lingo. To tell 
 it all would be to tarnish and smirch these pages, but one 
 point must be made as proof that hell is the antithesis 
 of heaven. I mean this " dying " dodge. In four of his 
 Epistles St. Paul speaks of " dying unto sin," and here the 
 devil steals this participle for the diametric business of 
 " dying " in order to sin. Verb. sap. 
 
 Here is a local nobody who with one little finger puts to 
 shame (1) Messrs. G. H. Lewes, (2) J. S. Mill, and (3) a 
 full bench of British judges. I shall prove all this, for it 
 is a mere matter of arithmetic and the chief is counting 
 on the ground. Exactly like the hieroglyphic texts of 
 Egypt, he has scratched a vertical line for each " one " of 
 the years he is trying to reckon back to Livingstone's day. 
 It certainly seems a sleepy sort of arithmetic, sleepy but 
 sure, for his " tortoise-total " gains in accuracy what it 
 has lost in speed. Better protract than subtract. Look 
 at the gains he has for the pains of scratching down the 
 five lines IIIII instead of our abrupt figure 5. Watch, I 
 say, what we lose : even Oxford is obUvious of the pains 
 we pay for our gains. For at this point the Luban 
 etymology becomes sarcastic about " counting," the verb 
 is soroshya or vala, lit. to " one " things. Sarcastic, I 
 mean, for when we dash down 5 or 9 on paper, how often do 
 we recall that we are really saying 5 ones, 9 owes, etc. ? 
 
 We mean all this but do not mention it, in fact have for- 
 gotten it ; hence not one in a hundred pauses to reflect 
 that a hundred = a hundred ones. This is where Solomon 
 adds a subtle dig in the reminder : " counting one by one 
 
218 MORE OF IT 
 
 to find out the account (Eccl. vii. 27). Sarcastic, I suggest, 
 is this " counting the matter one by one " because there is 
 no other way of counting ! When Gesandi's madman at 
 4 p.m. cried, " That, clock has just struck one o'clock 
 four times^! " his madness agreed with the wisdom of 
 Solomon. Even a " million " can only mean a million 
 " ones," and this the sensible millionaire knows on recalling 
 the old hand-to-mouth days when he only made his "jmil- 
 lion " by stingily conserving each " one " that goes to 
 aggregate this amount. Yet a whole bench of Scottish 
 judges broke on this rock of ellipsis by ignoring the com- 
 plementary word, unpronounced and unwritten, "ones." 
 Statistics were pouring out of a specialist, when Lord 
 Craighill begins it all with, " But 2 and 2 do not always 
 make 4, remember." " Then," frowned Lord Young, 
 " what are we here for ? " At this point Lord Maclaren 
 rushes to the relief of Lord Oraighill : " Well, you know, it 
 all depends : 2 candles and 2 carts of coal scarcely make 4." 
 So there (according to Africa) you have seven big judges in 
 a fog : even Lord Young who is right does not know why 
 he is right ; does not recall, rather, that " four " is an 
 elliptical expression, " four ones," the ellipsis being of the 
 numeral " one," not the simpleton " candles " and 
 " carts of coals " ! 
 
 Meantime here is this African chief of the town (also chief 
 of all arithmeticians) wondering at the intellectual insanity 
 involved in forgetting that you are only " one "-ing things 
 no matter how high you count. The same error this as 
 when the Master of Trinity set the same ball a-roUing in 
 criticising Kant. Standing four-square on this rock-of-ages 
 of arithmetic. Dr. Whewell insisted that " 3 and 2 must 
 always and altogether amount to 5," Then out darts the 
 whole wasps" nest of critics : G. H. Lewes, fortifying himseU 
 with a citation from Herschel, argues bluntly that other 
 conditions are easUy conceivable where 3 and 2 might not 
 nearly be 5. Then comes J. S. Mill to the same silly efiect, 
 and all because having gone too far east he has reached 
 west ! Yet the Master of Trinity was right (though he 
 did not know why he was right) when he said, " Three and 
 2 make 5 : we cannot conceive it otherwise. We cannot 
 
MORE OF IT 219 
 
 by any freak of thought imagine 3 and 2 to make 7." All 
 very massive, all very Master- of -Trinity-like, yet politely 
 evading this African explanation of ellipsis. Gesandi's 
 mad man cut them aU out when hearing the clock strike 
 at 4 p.m. he cried, " That clock has struck one o'clock 
 four times ! " For (to repeat it) did not Solomon try to 
 keep us aU straight long ago when he wrote, " Counting 
 one by one to find out the account " ? There is no other 
 
 way to count. To speak about " five " or " six " 
 
 is equivalent to me, John Smith, calling my brothers 
 
 " Jim " or " WiU ," the " Smith " being obviously 
 
 only for outsiders. 
 
 The king always comes with his orchestra, and many of 
 these professional baUad-singers have their ears cut off, the 
 reason being that the chief, fearing he would lose his 
 organist, clipped the ears close as a sort of trade-mark. 
 Thus, long hair in one land, short ears in another are a 
 peculiar proof of " many minds, many manners." This 
 Mr. Clipped-Ears, though, is not one whit abashed, and by 
 way of solatium he is allowed to be pert and even insulting 
 to his betters. The chief has actually paid him damages 
 for mutilation, in the form of a slave : he dines, too, on the 
 fat of the land, so that relatively speaking this ballad singer 
 lolls in the lap of luxury compared to many a poor English 
 musician. No wonder this Mr. Clipped-Ears is the most 
 contradictory type of man in the land, for his is at once the 
 easiest and hardest of occupations, plays when he works and 
 works when he plays. They open their eyes when I unfold 
 the lot of that type of delicate little grey-haired lady in the 
 heart of London who has all her life been pinched by giving 
 music lessons to children at ten shillings a quarter. Rain 
 or shine, walking all the way to Dulwich or Battersea or 
 farther because she cannot afford an omnibus fare, and even 
 then only earning bare bread and scanty ' butter. For 
 regarding the butter, does not Mrs. Flyn, her landlady, say 
 that it will not let the knife spread it. 
 
 To see the serious way this mutilated musician takes 
 poetry as a profession is amusing. Even the plainest facts 
 of life receive from him a polished coat of verbal varnish, 
 and for him to stoop from verse to plain speech is resented 
 
220 MORE OF IT 
 
 as mucli as a fancy race-horse forced to drag a team. 
 Everything is grist for his poetic mill, so he, 
 
 " In the course of one revolving moon. 
 Is fiddler, statesman, poet, and buffoon," 
 
 The eternal monotone of his music is at first maddening 
 to a new-comer, but after long years that very monotony 
 becomes your anodjoie of the night. Here, indeed, 
 is music, but not of the German band sort, no sawing of 
 loathsome jig-tunes here. From the intoning of the open- 
 ing bars, right on to the far remote end, monotony is 
 the law, now faUiag in weird cadence, spasmodic throbbing, 
 now soft, languorous, and disquieting. The African, like 
 John Milton, believes that rhyme is a kind of " disease of 
 poetry," and thus, refusing to be shackled, he has a free 
 poetic style, so delicately modulated that the absence of 
 rhyme is not missed. Force him to use the " jingling sounds 
 of like endings " and many a fine stanza would finish with 
 a jolt and an artificial tag. (Poets, beware !) Thus his 
 very blank verse saves you from being harassed with copious 
 outpouring of intolerable jingle : you feel quite sure that 
 if each line twanged in rhyme, you would go mad with the 
 penny- trumpet jangle. Not the twang merely, but the 
 certain knowledge that, to keep the artificial rhyme up, 
 some words were obliged to be thrown in under compulsion. 
 But listen to him : what he is really doing is sending back 
 to the woods an echo of their own voices. Precisely as 
 all the sounds of the African forest and plains are in the 
 minor, even so this weird note has invaded the negro mind, 
 and he can only send it back again in song. Even dazzling 
 coloured birds have no note but the minor, and the native 
 argues that the bird has only borrowed this idea of the 
 minor from the sighing tree on which it sings, the tree 
 having stolen the sigh from the babbling brook. Thus 
 Paul was right (Romans vui.) and dark Africa is like the 
 dark African, sighing from sea to sea. 
 
 Peering inside these stockades you see how fijst, last, 
 aU the time this ancestral spirit- worship of theirs grips the 
 land. The little two-feet-high temple is the local letter-box, 
 " left till called for " by the mipashi = spirits. But it is a 
 
MORE OF IT 221 
 
 parcel's post they believe in, beer and meat being stuffed 
 in as staple supply. Perhaps there is a spice of exaggera- 
 tion in calling these tedious little two-feet-high structures 
 " a temple," but the exaggeration is suspiciously sardonic 
 in character. With an upward wave of the hand at the 
 immensity of the universe, their hint seems to be that this 
 very smallness of temple suggests that if so small as two 
 feet nothing, then why not a still more sarcastic shrinkage 
 to nothing of the two feet ? Why a temple at all ? Why a 
 tangible building for the intangible spirit that leapt out 
 of the old prison house it loathed ? Here is a man who as 
 a tiny boy, long ago in war, was swooped down on in his 
 natal village. Query : How can he worship a mother he 
 never knew ? The boy's retort is that, albeit he was so 
 torn away at birth from his unknown mother, yet he, surely 
 he too was born as much as everybody else ? That he never 
 knew her is less than nothing, nothing at all to him, for he 
 has only to pinch his flesh to remind himself that she gave 
 him this blood, this body. So there he is, working away at 
 the bmldiag of his little temple to the " unknown god," 
 his nameless mother's spirit. Proud of it, too, this two-feet- 
 high temple : Michelangelo taking in the full effect of his 
 finished Sistiue Chapel could not have had more thrills of 
 self-satisfaction than this long-grass youngster. Although 
 unknown, yet is she well known — here is her own blood 
 flowing in his own veins. Hence the double deduction 
 he makes that (1) even in the spirit-world, throb for throb 
 of his earthly joy is hers, even as (2) stab for stab of his 
 pain is hers too. (It is all " mother," " mother," mark 
 you, and no mention of his father. Often he does not know 
 his name, and just as often — hush ! — the mother knows 
 it not either.) 
 
 So he " bridges the gulf " : for does he not believe that 
 in every pang that rends his heart his guardian spirit still 
 has a part ? The victim of many a cruel and ungenerous 
 blow in life, does he not still reckon on the dear old maternal 
 solicitude for his welfare ? God, he thinks, is too busy up 
 among the stars to bother about him, but not so, never so, 
 his defunct " mama." Watch the subtlety of all this, for 
 like a dam of rocks relentlessly solid, here is a barrier 
 
222 MORE OF IT 
 
 ever blocking the advance of the Gospel. To preach Christ 
 as kinsman-advocate before God is to the negro only, in 
 other words, a branch of the same spirit- worship. Wearied 
 by the well of Sychar, thirsty on life's road, and pained with 
 the pangs of sufferings, does He not now sorrow with us in 
 our sorrow ? Poor old African, groping after, if haply 
 he may find. The only way he hopes to capture the strong- 
 hold of The Unseen is by this flank movement of kinsman- 
 ship — to him the line of least resistance being the warm, 
 cherishing heart of his defunct mother. No wonder Living- 
 stone longed for ten thousand Christians to advance in God's 
 name for God's sake and shout above all the wintry winds 
 of Africa : " I am the way." 
 
 By the fourteenth of July all our craven carriers have 
 got this big man on the brain, and when he fixes them with 
 his cold glittering eyes they quiver. Short and middle- 
 aged (forty at a guess), he strongly approves of the late 
 Mushidi for having introduced a new squat style in kingly 
 stature. Like the familar fox and the traditional grapes, 
 he objects to tall men and quotes the coarse post-mortem 
 proverb : '' The more flesh, the more worms ! " This hemp 
 slavery of his, though, makes the man a bad bundle of 
 contradictions, the distinct effect of the drug being a dis- 
 location of personality when opposites chase opposites 
 in and out of his brain. You can time to a second when the 
 fit of dissolving in smiles will be sharply superseded by its 
 opposite in which he is intoxicated by the ftunes of passion. 
 Benignity versus malignity is the idea. Wait a few 
 minutes and round goes the circle into a caressing, hypo- 
 critical voice, all deference and even diffidence ; a pause, 
 one, two, or three minutes, then the eyes begin to glitter 
 dangerously and once again you have the erstwhile sim- 
 perer shouting out in a stand-and-deliver tone of voice. 
 The very eyes play the same game of paradox, for the same 
 man who one moment is looking out moodily at vacancy 
 with a glassy stare, is the next fiendishly beautiful. Count- 
 ing six minutes apiece for the play of each set of opposites, 
 here you have a man who has the sensation of summer and 
 winter crammed into twelve minutes as against the twelve 
 months in nature. No wonder all the terrible murders 
 
MORE OF IT 223 
 
 in Africa are hemp atrocities, and of the hemp-slave it is 
 true in a rather tragic sense that he has chosen the evil part 
 that cannot be taken away from him. The plain fact is 
 we are in a dangerous trap, and prisoners every soul of us. 
 As far as he can lucidly explain himself he fixes the date of 
 our departure at — at doomsday. 
 
 Yet wants us in his haze of hemp to be ofi like Lightning, 
 tarrying not a second by the way ! To verify this double- 
 personaHty idea, I resolved to keep a sharp look-out 
 for a conclusive instance. Here it comes. Fortifying 
 himself with one great wheezing pull at the pipe, I watched 
 sharply the sequel. Came the usual speech of the half- 
 and-half kind, now graceful and polished, now sinking into 
 pun and quibble ! up, up, soaring in empyrean heights, 
 then crash down to earth with the plunge of a broken- 
 winged aeroplane. 
 
 There are no words in or out of the dictionary equal to 
 the explanation of how this chapter ends. It closes to the 
 chanson of the African rain bird, a simple little thing sung 
 in three descending notes of the diatonic scale, very simple 
 yet very sweet because of its round-it-goes-again soft 
 repetition. For my initials are not D. C. for nothing. 
 
CHAPTER XVII 
 SOME OLD PALAVERS 
 
 One more African attempt to make 
 works balance faith. For as faith is 
 to works so light is to heat, and, while 
 you can chemically discriminate be- 
 tween a candle's light and heat, yet put 
 out the candle and good-bye both. 
 
 15 
 
" // one has served thee, tell the deed to many : 
 Hast thou served many ? Tell it not to any." 
 
 " In this world of froth and bubble. 
 Two things stand like stone : 
 Kindness in another's trouble. 
 Courage in one's own." 
 
 " We may not use God's name merely to fill up the gap in an 
 argument, for God is love, and love is not in word but in deed." 
 
CHAPTER XVII 
 
 SOME OLD PALAVERS 
 
 fTr\HIS potentate must be a lineal descendant of one of 
 I All Baba's forty thieves. Creditors have better 
 "^ memories than debtors, and here you have 
 Mieremiere foaming at the mouth over some old 
 " Livingstone palavers," as he names them. I am to 
 blame, I am Livingstone's " brother," and the older the 
 debt the more interest is accruing in the intervening years. 
 No, I say, in my country old clothes do not fetch high 
 prices in the rag market. 
 
 They have jumbled them all up : (1) Livingstone's 
 Safene shooting a man in error instead of a cow, then (2) 
 the bigger business of Chawende's town attacked and 
 plundered, and aU by Livingstone's men on the return 
 north with his dead body. He was surprised when, in a 
 welter of blind rage, I told him I knew aU about it, knew 
 especially the surly welcome these Ushi people gave the 
 body of this man made of such very special clay. Their 
 towns and territory spuming that dead body so soon to be 
 acclaimed by aU England ! Then I cooled down a bit and, 
 restraining my inclinations at the call of refinement, I 
 blamed booze for it all, the whole fight being brought 
 about by the chief's son who defied theic own proverb, 
 " Drink beer, think beer." 
 
 Then I push the point that our dead hero must not be 
 blamed for the dare-devil doings of men who, having lost 
 their master, lost likewise, with him, the curb against their 
 cupidity. Also : I press the point that Livingstone 
 strictly speakiug had only an inner circle of five faithfuls, 
 and all the rest were a rabble sent up from the coast 
 by Stanley, who toyed with the name of " soldiers," calling 
 his carriers by a name Livingstone never did. These 
 
 227 
 
228 SOME OLD PALAVERS 
 
 were the miserables of whom the Doctor wrote derisively : 
 " The pugnacious spirit is one of the necessities of life. 
 When people have little or none of it, they are subjected 
 to indignity and loss. My own men walk into houses where 
 we pass the nights without asking any leave, and steal cas- 
 sava without shame : while if we are at a village where 
 the natives are a little pugnacious they are as meek as 
 sucking doves. The peace plan involves indignity and 
 wrong. I give little presents to the headmen, and to some 
 extent heal their hurt sensibilities. This is indeed much 
 appreciated, and produces profoimd hand-clapping." 
 
 This opens up the whole rigmarole of why they carried 
 his dead body so far, so persistently. Here on the spot 
 analysis is the death of sentiment, and their " why ? " 
 is found in as many reasons as realities. First, there was 
 the old African law forbidding such a dangerous thing : 
 any African found dead in the forest dare not be buried 
 except after prior consent by his relatives. Livingstone's 
 nearest friends were out at Zanzibar. Thus these wild 
 fellows were doing a deed that would save both their face 
 and skiQ. And much more the latter than the former. 
 They were all men sent in from Zanzibar by the Stanley 
 who had threatened Livingstone's other runaways with 
 dire vengeance : " I told them," says he, " that it was well 
 I had found Livingstone alive, for if they had but injured 
 a hair of his head, I should have gone back to the coast 
 to return with a party which would enable me to avenge 
 him." Add to all this menace Stanley's " find Living- 
 stone alive or dead " slogan to his men, and it is plausible 
 almost to the point of conviction that these men were not 
 doing six degrees of latitude and ten of longitude with a 
 dead body for nothing. 
 
 Take my own experience with the dead LucascofE. One 
 day there came a Russian in from the far east, nearly seven 
 feet high was this man with long black beard. He shot a 
 number of elephants and built a log cabin at the south end of 
 the Lake. Then, later, he broke camp and asked me to give 
 him men to foUow my old trail over the Range, and 
 so away out, far out to the Atlantic. Ofi he went, to die, 
 alas ! of blackwater in a lonely forest half-way across. But 
 
SOME OLD PALAVERS 229 
 
 my men would not dare bury him like a victim of their 
 spears. What then ? Following the analogy of the dead 
 Livingstone, on they go with their ghoulish burden, on 
 and on for hundreds of miles until at last, with a bound 
 of trepidation and triumph, our outpost station at Kavungu 
 was reached. Only and obviously grim necessity and not 
 a spark of sentiment ! All those breathless, blazing days, 
 with plugged nostrils and vertical rays, they fought the 
 great blue-bottle flies and rank emanations from their bur- 
 den of woe. Sentiment, far from having even a subordinate 
 interest in this gruesome job, was non est. The natives 
 themselves know themselves so thoroughly, know they are 
 such champion liars, that the wrong cause of en route 
 death could easUy be concocted, so they cut the knot and 
 decide on delivery of the corpse to its nearest relatives. 
 Here, then, is collateral proof that these wild fellows were 
 not out to establish a credit a/c with the Kecording Angel. 
 
 And surely this explains the austere action of the Consul- 
 General on their arrival at Zanzibar, nothing but a stand- 
 offish reception of the " faithfuls " and their burden. Cap- 
 tain Prideaux has been flouted for many years for doing a 
 deed that easily and evidently proves him to be the only 
 man of the lot who did an exact amount of " thinking 
 black." Even although nothing had developed to in- 
 criminate the action of any of " the 57," the boys themselves 
 knew that this alone could be, should be, the rigorous 
 mode of reception by this " brother " of the dead man. 
 Had he gushed effusively over those bearers of a dead 
 body, they would certainly have conjectured that the gush 
 was expressive of delight (fact !) at Livingstone's death. 
 Can you stop the circulation of your blood with an effort 
 of the will ? No more can you change the African belief 
 in the awfidness of death ; and even an archangel would 
 have been punished by them for " death damages " in a 
 like situation. Therefore, although tradition has hallowed 
 the popular notion that Livingstone's men were nonplussed 
 and dejected at their gruff reception by this official, it is 
 a " dead cert." that they were glad they escaped so easily. 
 
 Then the trouble was that some of the leading men being 
 Stanley's old " soldiers," the gentler methods of Living- 
 
230 SOME OLD PALAVERS 
 
 stone were despised by men who made Mm " the sport of 
 adverse circumstances, the plaything of the miserable 
 beings sent to him from Zanzibar." When Stanley sent 
 off those 57 men for Livingstone, did he not take care to 
 lock them all up the night before in a courtyard ? There 
 were three Mabarukis in that crowd, one a Burtonite, the 
 other a Spekeite, the third a Stanleyite, all three whites 
 who were known as mlcali sana kama moto, lit. as angry as 
 blazes. No wonder the Livingstone who had no blazes 
 of his own was to pay bitterly for those other blazes belong- 
 ing to Messrs. Burton, Speke, and Stanley. In fact, 
 Stanley bribed them off from the coast with the guarantee : 
 " Livingstone will not beat you as I have done : when did 
 you ever see him lift his hand against an offender ? When 
 you were wicked he did not speak to you in anger, he spoke 
 to you in tones of sorrow." 
 
 This then explains the tangle they have got us into 
 to-day : they were rough diamonds but more rough than 
 diamond. In these parts, at any rate, they took the bit 
 in their teeth and bolted. All the guns were now at their dis- 
 posal, too many of them, not forgetting their own Enfields, 
 the sixteen shooter, and the famous Reilley with the Eraser 
 shells. Even of Susi himself, the best of the lot, yes, of 
 Susi it might be narrated how drink was his bane, and 
 when once in liquor he made all sorts of mad antics. Ac- 
 tually, at Makumba's, lying down in the same bed with his 
 master sleeping so deeply that only the early dawn revealed 
 this black sot asleep by his side ! This was the same Susi 
 whose same passion for booze lost for Livingstone at 
 Mukungu his supply of sugar and flour with the 900-f athom 
 sounding-line. 
 
 But where are we now ? At last we reach his old capital, 
 which during the last few days has been burned to the 
 groimd, stockade included. Beneficent antiseptic blaze 
 this burning of their local London, for fire, and fire alone, 
 could wipe out the filth. Dignity equates dirt in Africa 
 and the so-called Capital was a dark mass of dilapidated 
 huts : all the dainties and decencies of life despised. The 
 sacred " ark " = " Makumba " had of course to take refuge 
 in the woods and the guess is that it is a stone, only a 
 
SOME OLD PALAVERS 231 
 
 guess remember, for none dare whisper its form or nature. 
 It is personified always, and worshipped as a supernatural 
 being because all insist that it came down from heaven. 
 " Makumba's " house was destroyed in the fire, but — 
 ahem !— it would not have been so destroyed, say they, 
 had Makumba been in it. Mieremiere has halted two hours 
 back on the road, not daring to enter the old town until 
 Makumba has been brought back and installed ; we too 
 had to steer clear of the place and are now camped on the 
 right bank of the Luela. Mieremiere appeared by the 
 roadside this morning, face furrowed with ill temper, 
 and ordered the boys to lay down their loads and camp. 
 I had therefore to admonish him for five minutes as he was 
 never admonished before, and in the end he graciously 
 said we could go on. 
 
 But this is not all nor nearly all : now follow days of 
 enforced halting, as the chief won't hear of our going on 
 yet. As far as he can explain himself he merely wants 
 the fame of our visit to spread far and near : offers, more- 
 over, many bribes to us just to stay on with him, including 
 an initial present of six oxen. Very mad and erratic he 
 gets, sometimes loses all shame as to dress, and will crouch 
 down at rebuke (bluff ?) like a little child. Again and again, 
 face flushed and festal, he is so preposterous that you his 
 prisoner must tell the lord of the whole land that you would 
 rather have his room than his company. On the 17th in 
 presence of a large crowd he formally handed over Monsieur 
 Giraud's plundered boat, five sections all told, the third 
 badly torn and battered on the upper plate. " Guardian," 
 he styled himself (Wakulama), and in this character he 
 took his seat among the sections to be photographed. At 
 first he refused nervously, saying, " No ! no ! don't carry 
 me away to Europe," but he soon consented on hearing 
 that it was to emphasise this role of guardianship (!) that 
 he was being " written down with the boat." Therefore, 
 to the glory of God we write it, after much praying and 
 palavering him round we broke away at last from Miere- 
 miere. The crowd of men were told off in his presence to 
 take Giraud's derelict across country to Chinama's, where 
 it will await our return from the south. The veneer of 
 
232 SOME OLD PALAVERS 
 
 his " friendship " peeled ofE rather quickly towards the 
 end : demands for one thing after another had to be refused 
 and only the sternest of rejoinders kept him in place. He 
 was really disconsolate that here we were slipping through 
 his fingers, having only realised a very small exchequer 
 amount from us. 
 
 I saw some malachite to-day ground down and laid on 
 the wound with a feather. This was also Livingstone's 
 expedient when a review of his dwindling possessions 
 revealed that he had run out of medicine. They even put 
 it on the eyes for ophthalmia, and it comes across river 
 from the Sanga country where there are millions of tons 
 of copper. This bluestone is panacea for all ills internal 
 and external, and when I was sick the big chief affably 
 waved his big hand at a big sulphate of copper mountain, 
 as much as to say : " Now don't forget that you are to take 
 a shovelful of bluestone in a barrel of water after each 
 meal ! " When Livingstone lost his medicine chest, then 
 he knew his near future to be his final days. It cut him to 
 the bone to think that onward from this dark day of drug- 
 deprivation he must do business with Africa on the hair- 
 trigger basis. For the moment he forgot everything else 
 in the numbing realisation that old Africa with disconcert- 
 ing seriousness of purpose was out to Idll him. The soldier 
 has lost his sword, the carpenter his adze, the blacksmith 
 his hammer, and the doomed doctor has gone out of the 
 profession. At first flash he faced this horror of a drugless 
 Africa with almost as much loathing as he used to regard 
 a bottle of patent medicine. Later, with Hght heart and 
 lighter luggage, the tune changes : disturbed but not 
 daunted he sees the sunshine through the mists of mercy. 
 God is his " Doctor " now, in the final philological sense 
 that " doctor " only means " teacher " ; and did not Job, 
 after aU his toils and boils, shout " Who teacheth like 
 Thee ? " 
 
 But do not miss the point of the lost medicine chest : 
 he was not so much downcast for No. 1 as for No. 1,000,000 ; 
 the Africa that stole the drugs only robbed itself of his 
 splendid medicinal succour. Did not the self-same Africa 
 that stole millions of its own Africans for export slavery 
 
SOME OLD PALAVERS 233 
 
 thereby rob itself in so robbing them 1 All along his route, 
 remember, Livingstone's loss became a diurnal disaster 
 reAdved when those natives with limited means and un- 
 limited infirmity streamed in on him with their wounds. 
 Not forgetting the maUngerer who seems somehow to 
 suffer from all the ailments in the Medical Dictionary. 
 Besides, what a lost key it was ! How often in Africa the 
 long-closed tribal door will only open to this very medical 
 help from an outsider who otherwise would be spared not 
 a single humiliation, not a single indignity. 
 
 Take our first case in point : watch how we conciliate 
 these cut-throats. Picture a tall hunter of powerful build, 
 with a smile that would frighten a bull-dog. But when 
 his tale is told, it is a wonder he has a smile at all. Have 
 not two years dragged past since his right arm was torn 
 to pieces by the bursting of his old " five feet of gas-pipe " 
 gun ? The story runs that, being a big brave black, he had 
 enough of the child left in him to want his weapon to go off 
 with a bang ; so, one day in hunting, he loaded up inordi- 
 nately, the charge of powder nearly a foot deep in the barrel. 
 Of course, the bang that should have flattened the elephant 
 on the ground bursty back on the hunter, and the biter 
 was bit. Thus began the twenty-four dragging months 
 of agony, when the quacks from far and near exploited the 
 gaping wound until the one became many. At last, we 
 come on the scene, and the problem now stands how to 
 break this ring of rascals and cure our man. Well, my 
 plucky wife, after much judicious wheedling, finally 
 conciliated the whole gang of kinsmen, the stoutest objector 
 being the man's own wife, who resentfully sniffed a very 
 gem of a sniff in protest. To the last, this good lady — 
 one of the weU-meaning, fussy type — ^turned up her nose 
 at the idea of a " death-sleep " operation ; but this turning 
 up of her nose was not to be wondered at, for the said 
 snub-nose is naturally adapted for that purpose. Yet 
 was she a kindly little body, and no doubt it was out of 
 genuine affection for the sufferer she resented the terribly 
 business-like look of the table and gleaming instruments. 
 Just as a peaceful cat dozing in the sunlight becomes a 
 thing of bristling wickedness and fury when an enemy 
 
234 SOME OLD PALAVERS 
 
 comes on the scene, even so Mrs. Hunter and her dislike 
 of this " death-sleep." But, at last, we won her round. 
 Result : a splendidly successful amputation of the arm 
 by my pioneer wife, the poor hunter getting the first 
 moment of peaceful calm in two years when he entered that 
 soft fleecy cloud of chloroform. Then after three days, 
 all the premature wrinkles of pain smoothed out of his 
 brow, and once again the old joie de vivre flamed up in his 
 face — a triumph of antiseptic surgery. In the coming years, 
 no doubt, when Africa is a gridirion of railways, smart 
 brick hospitals will grace these latitudes, but no surgeon 
 will ever boast of such fame as this " death-sleep " lady 
 and her pioneer operation. 
 
 The broken fragments of that old gun were nursed 
 solemnly like sentient things, and the hunter often whis- 
 pered his apologies to his broken " Brown Bess." He told 
 me that he learned to shoot with it, and had never forgotten 
 this, his first love : " Shooting," he said, " is like learning to 
 play the hand piano [Chidimba] — who ever learned to play 
 on borrowed instruments ? " But after all, man is a com- 
 parative race, and he can only learn by contrasts. Here 
 is another old hunter, dying in a dirty hut, but no cure for 
 him. His son nurses him, and this is the dialogue over- 
 heard. Asked the young man, " What is life, father ? " 
 Answered the old 'un, " Life, my son, is one hit and many 
 misses ! " Of course, in all this, the poor old black " medi- 
 cine-man " gets scurvy treatment for his professional pains. 
 One sarcasm I heard was directed against a native boasting 
 that he was only moderately rich, but immoderately 
 healthy : " Take care ! Your doctor is dead since he 
 gave you a health certificate ! " Poor doctors ! professional 
 etiquette demands that they dare not die. Wild kill-or- 
 cure treatment is their idea, hence the negro professional 
 proverb : " If the drug is not bitter you cannot get better." 
 In sober earnest, these quacks with their mordant medicines 
 seem to know more about the verb " to smart " than the 
 verb " to be smart." They have variety, too. There was 
 a case in which a sick son tried two doctors (or rather, 
 they tried him), but what with rival doctors and rival 
 medicines they nearly killed their man. Does not the 
 
SOME OLD PALAVERS 235 
 
 native proverb run : " Drink two doses of different medi- 
 cines and you will vomit " ? A warning this to avoid 
 caUing in rival doctors. Well, at this point, the genial 
 mother intervenes, and, rescuing the son from the clutches 
 of the two medicoes, cures him in as many days. The 
 natives, by way of compliment, now make a triple pun 
 of the business, and luckily for once, English, as a language, 
 renders the idea, if not the actual words : " Better than 
 allopathy or homeopathy is sympathy ! " This, however, 
 is exceptional, for very rarely will an English phrase rhyme 
 with a Bantu equivalent. But by no manner of means 
 can you persuade these old medicine-men that they are not 
 " servants of God." Their cry is, " Not unto us, not unto 
 us, be the glory of any cure," and then they break out into 
 a weird little song of " God-praise," as they call it. Here it 
 is translated : 
 
 " Up in heaven yonder 
 
 There is a travelling Doctor 
 Who passeth through the lands 
 Bringing healings unto man." 
 
 Thus, unlike the Italians, who say " Three doctors — two 
 atheists," this old leech praises God at every turn, the sleek 
 suggestion being that God is indeed God, but this local 
 Mahomet is His precious prophet, mis-spelt " profit." 
 It is only right to restore the balance of this story, how- 
 ever, by stating that if he thus sings such sweet language 
 to God, it is certain that his worst Billingsgate is reserved 
 for us. The lady " doctors " are even more bitter than the 
 men and abuse you with a fish-wife's tongue. 
 
 Look what leverage we get in talking about their two 
 tribal " unmentionables " : God and death. Naturally 
 and normally these are taboo, yet simply because we are 
 heading for the grave of a " God's man " (wa kwa Leza) 
 all the verbal barricades are down. Thus we have both 
 hrevet and vouchsaf ement to go for them a la the following 
 adroit formula : " Now, here is the story that lay deep in 
 Livingstone's heart. He could not tell it to you and your 
 fathers, for he, a djdng man, did not know your lingo : spoke 
 only a little Swahili and that by interpretation. Yes, 
 this was the sum of all he longed to tell you, the message 
 
236 SOME OLD PALAVERS 
 
 lie wrote to his son : ' Take God for your Father, Jesus 
 Christ for your Saviour, the Holy Spirit for your Sanctifier 
 and all is well.' " 
 
 Meantime, here we have this uxorious King sitting, actu- 
 ally sitting, on one of his wives as a living sofa or ottoman. 
 He boasts of dozens such. And (worse still) with sleepy 
 defiance in his bloodshot eyes, he swears they will be 
 buried alive with him. This affords me the appropriate 
 opportunity to digress across river and describe these 
 holocaust deaths, the living buried with the dead. 
 
CHAPTEK XVIII 
 THE PASSING OF OLD "PERHAPS" 
 
 The matter stands thus. Just as 
 in " the servant question " of Africa 
 one boy is a boy, two boys half a boy, 
 three boys no boy at all, so it is with 
 the bag-ani-baggage ■phase of bush life. 
 " Cut down the dead loads " was the old 
 pioneer watchword, and the choice still 
 stands between too many dead loads or 
 " dead " Missionaries. 
 
" / have heard people say that Christianity made the blacks worse, 
 but did not agree with them. I can stand a good deal of bosh ; but 
 to tell me that Christianity makes people worse — ugh ! tell that to the 
 young trouts." 
 
 Livingstone. 
 
 " We are adherents of a benign holy religion, and may by consistent 
 conduct and wise, patient efforts become the harbingers of peace to 
 a hitherto distracted and trodden-down race," 
 
 Idem. 
 
CHAPTER XVIII 
 THE PASSING OF OLD "PERHAPS" 
 
 MENTIONED very rarely, visited more rarely still 
 is this Chona district to wliicli I am now hurry- 
 ing. The King, my oldest African friend, has 
 just died and the question nagging at the back of my brain 
 is whether the old deeds of burial-murder will still go on ? 
 Such is my agonising anxiety : will the living once more go 
 down into the same grave as the dead ? And the devil's 
 " old reliables," the necromancers and wizards, will they 
 stiU rule the occasion ? An affirmative answer will pour 
 reproach on our eSorts, for this King got the succession 
 on my nomiuation and a great twenty years we made 
 of it. 
 
 Farther down river Ward saw much of this human sacrifice 
 and tells of one instance which happened just before the 
 decapitation of a slave, who was being sacrificed according 
 to custom after the death of a chief. He observed a relative 
 of the recently deceased chief engaged in serious conver- 
 sation with the poor man, whose hands and feet were 
 already bound, and just about to be executed. He 
 ascertained that the victim was receiving a message which, 
 after death, he was charged to convey to the spirit of the 
 deceased chief. The conclusion of the message was some- 
 what as foUows : " And teU him when you meet that his 
 biggest war-canoe, which I inherit, is rotten." Not a dying 
 yeU, remember, but only a great dry sob. Africa ! 
 
 One cry there is, though, so imiform the words that it 
 almost amounts to a horrible technical term. Reminiscent 
 of the Epistle to the Romans as it is, you cannot resist 
 the steady conviction that Paul must have known it too. 
 Take, perhaps, a dozen such cases known to me, I mean, the 
 living forced to embrace the mortifying corpse. The 
 
 239 
 
240 THE PASSING OF OLD "PERHAPS" 
 
 terrible formula of their cry was just Romans vii. 24 over 
 again : " Who shall deliver me from this body of death ? " 
 No negro could ever read Paul's anti-sin moan in Romans 
 without a special shudder at that metaphor : well he knows 
 what it means, for often did he hear that cry. And long 
 may he shudder at sin, say I. 
 
 But let this genuine witness tell the whole story, " The 
 air/' says he, " was filled with dust, tainted with the smell 
 of heated African bodies and a sickly odour from the log 
 fires. The evening breeze occasionally wafted the columns 
 of smoke across the wild revellers, momentarily hiding 
 them from view. By the lurid glow of the huge log fires, 
 despite the almost fiendish appearance of the savages, I 
 was deeply impressed with the vivid effect of the scene, 
 with its action, and with its striking contrasts. As my 
 eyes grew more accustomed to the surroimdings I observed 
 many natives dancing at the edge of a deep hole which had 
 been recently dug in the ground. Whilst leaning forward 
 to obtain a clearer view, and conjecturing upon the object 
 of the wild proceedings, I was startled by a mighty shout 
 uttered from hundreds of hoarse throats. Tumiug, I 
 saw several men forcing their way through the multitude 
 in the direction of the dark abyss. A jingling sound of 
 bells heralded a procession of dancing figures, whose forms 
 stood forth in bold reHef as they passed in front of the 
 blazing fires. A space was cleared in front of the hole 
 and in a few moments there bounded forward the great 
 charm-doctor, painted and bedecked with leopard skins 
 and rattling charms, outward tokens of the absolute ruler 
 of the destinies of heathen African savages. This hideous- 
 looking creature, with whitened eyelids and body smeared 
 with fowls' brains and blood, commenced the dance of 
 Death. With sinuous movements of the body he pranced 
 around the clear space, kicking up a perfect cloud of dust, 
 and chanting a quaint savage song. Round and round, 
 each time faster, whirled the uncanny figure. At length 
 he stopped, bathed in perspiration, dusty and bedraggled, 
 and seated himself at the edge of the hole. Another hideous 
 shout rent the air. Ten women, the former wives of the 
 deceased chief, with hands and feet bound, were dragged 
 
THE PASSING OF OLD "PERHAPS" 241 
 
 forward and placed upon the ground in front of the charm- 
 doctor. Shortly afterwards a number of young men, for- 
 merly slaves of the chief, were also brought forward to the 
 brink of the hole. Then amidst a scene of wild confusion 
 the corpse of the great chief, now swathed in yards of 
 cotton and grass cloth, was borne forward. Above the 
 heads of the swaying crowd I caught sight of dark bodies 
 being hurled into the hole. I could just distinguish the 
 agonised shrieks of women, the unfortunate wives who were 
 being sacrificed. The body of the chief was next placed 
 in the hole. The crowd surged, swayed and shouted even 
 more vociferously than ever when a himdred hands 
 commenced to heave the earth into the living tomb of the 
 chief's wives, who were thus buried alive. Hemmed in 
 by the crowd, I found myself unable to retire from the 
 horrible scene. The hole was soon filled in, and crowds 
 of natives then danced upon the spot. The first of the 
 slaves was now brought forward. His head was fixed in a 
 framework, suspended to an overhanging branch. A bright 
 gleam of the executioner's knife, followed by a frantic 
 yeU from the multitude, denoted that the first of the numer- 
 ous band of the late chief's slaves had been decapitated." 
 Thus you see it is not for nothing I am speeding over the 
 hiUs to try a counterstroke. Why not outwit the Devil 
 even here at his head-quarters ? Now Chona has gone and I 
 am " chief " mourner in the double sense of this adjective ; 
 chiefs are pouring in from all points of the compass so 
 what a converging chance for me and my Gospel panacea. 
 Was not this Paul's idea when he so pertinaciously desired 
 to see Rome the great centre to which all the roads of 
 the world radiate ? For granted he gets to that roaring 
 cosmopolitan Capital, then all nations will fiow in to the 
 prisoner Paul, who could not move out to call upon them 
 in his chain.' 
 
 ^ Later : Disturbed but nothing daunted, I am certain my presence on the 
 old sacrificial spot saved human lives. A letter just to hand seems to point 
 that way. Often our Government officers, with the deliberate concentration 
 of aloof indifference, ignore what a mollifying factor the Missionary can be 
 in the hindering of tribal murders, but the bigger the official the bigger the 
 compliment. For instance, here on my return from this successful visit of 
 mine, I find a letter awaiting me from our Administrator territorial, Baron 
 
 16 
 
242 THE PASSING OF OLD "PERHAPS" 
 
 This dead King's name is a long tongue-twisting thing, 
 Chimfwamalembachivulemvidachidimidanga. But there is 
 very much thought in this unmasticated mouthful, for it 
 means, "A - fog - of - a - fellow - yet - do - not - judge - him - 
 too- quickly -for - an - African - fog - means - either - much - 
 rain - or - much - sunshine." In other words, this Chona 
 knew he was not much to look at, knew also that facial 
 beauty often means a disappointing degree of ethical 
 attainment, hence his choice of the local fog as a name 
 because of its equivocal character, may mean bad rain or 
 sweet sunshine, " don't-trust-appearances " sort of hint. 
 Like the fog on the Welsh mountains where a man gropiag 
 his way saw on ahead a monstrous figure : nearer, it turned 
 out to be a man : nearer stUl, lo ! it was his brother. All of 
 which you can see every morning you stand on the edge of 
 the wall of moimitains overhanging the King's ancestral 
 valley : far below the eternal fog exudes from the marshes, 
 an aqueous pall resisting the suUen and smouldering ferocity 
 of the sun for several hours until forced out of business by 
 the ultimate blaze bursting down. Curious, is it not ? 
 that this very word for fog, Chimfwa, also means " death," 
 the very point I now drive home to those mourning 
 crowds who know too well the equivocal effect of their 
 fogs ; perhaps good, perhaps bad weather resulting ; per- 
 haps a happy heaven or unholy hell, Chimfwa — a fog = 
 death = perhaps 1 = who knows what will happen ? 
 
 Once I snapped his profile with a Kodak and he was 
 exasperated about having only " the half of his face." 
 " No," said he, " I want the other half of my face." True 
 to his double-innuendo name of " the fog," I never saw that 
 other half, but in his very death he left me the lovely 
 legacy of a large Bible School built right up near his own 
 private compound 50 feet X 36. Not only this, but across 
 stream in his territory he encouraged the building of five 
 such Bible Schools, at Kinkonka's, at Kanswa, at Mutavi's, 
 at Duvye's, at Chipata's, all of which are now running 
 
 Fallon : " Hope you are all right in Luanza now," writes he. " I am glad, very 
 glad, to hear things went smoothly up there, for I was anxious : I am quite 
 certain it is due to your prestige and I am very grateful to you to have been 
 up there." 
 
THE PASSING OF OLD "PERHAPS" 243 
 
 strong. These are the cocoons from wMcli we hope to 
 hatch a Spurgeon and a Moody. Besides, his royal 
 initiative was infectious, then followed the Bible School 
 at Kasenga, then the one at Mpweto, then the Lukonsolwa 
 one, then the one at the Mukuva River, besides three more 
 in the outskirts, not to mention the mother of them all in 
 Luanza, 800 on the roU, perhaps 1,000 soon. Well done 
 for the Luban monarch ; surely this dear old non-com- 
 mittal King Fog eventuated in sweet sunshine at least. I 
 shovdd like to think so, at any rate, for they tell me that, 
 well on to the end, he stuck to the personal supervision 
 of " God's House," urging the workers on with beat of 
 drum and native orchestra, a siacere, a dignified African 
 who never was on talking terms with a lie. So there it 
 was in his own memorial building we mourned him dead, 
 his own name " Fog " = " Perhaps " goading me on to 
 gush out those dozens of " we knows " gladdening John's 
 Gospel. 
 
 But to return to these royal burials ; here is a sardonic 
 custom for you, and, to avoid a distracting miiltiplicity of 
 issues, the reader is requested to note a curiosity of a fact. 
 Your logical Central African whose tribal life is so full of 
 dear little conceits must even in the sacred matter of death 
 sport these. Hence this erratic whim of his called a 
 " dynastic death," a given dynasty of Kings actually 
 speciaKsing on a private mode of djdng, it is the dynastic 
 " patent." Here, among his islands, you have the old 
 King Mwenge down this Lualaba River. Now, the Mwenge 
 of any given year may not, ex officio, die a mere " Lufu 
 Leza " (God-death, i.e. natural death) like the ordinary 
 stock of Adam, oh no ! There is a dynastic conceit ordain- 
 ing that he, the said Mwenge, must die with a windpipe 
 perforated with needles. This Medo-Persic law is special- 
 ised in the language as the technical " Mwenge death." 
 So when your Mwenge is down with even a bad cold, he lies 
 warily awake o' nights, the well-known Luban dagger in 
 his hand, fearing a raid from the " young men with the 
 needles." Very loud and lively is the sick-chamber kept 
 the whole night, faggots blazing, and for life's sake he must 
 really be afoot and lively in a day or two. 
 
244 THE PASSING OF OLD "PERHAPS" 
 
 Across the Lufirathe Sampwe people arrange sucli matters 
 rather differently ; stiU the same dynastic death idea, 
 though. They, also, have this antipathy to a chief 
 dying on his mat a " God-death," therefore, when death is 
 really suspicioned as near, the chief and a wife or two, 
 and even an uncle, are hurried along their dynastic via 
 dolorosa to the well-known clifi from which they are dashed 
 headlong to their dynastic death. Meantime, within the 
 royal stockade the " Prince of Wales " of those latitudes 
 has ascended the Chipona (throne). He it was who wire- 
 pulled his father's death, and now he is acclaimed amid 
 deafening jubilation, wearing a wealth of coloured calico 
 in voluptuous folds. The sharp intended contrast of aU 
 this is diamatic, the old King's dying shriek at the ancestral 
 olifi being timed to coincide with the shout of acclamation 
 as his son ascends the throne in Uneal descent from Old 
 Kiag Cole I. 
 
 The reason of all this is obvious : interregnum is the 
 African's horror, for it spells loot and rapine. There 
 is then red anarchy, for autocracy is so utterly the 
 negro potentate's boast, that the day he dies the natives 
 pay his bereft kingdom in his own coin. Desolating the 
 land, that is to say, on the ironical plea that, of course, as 
 the absolute monarch is dead, ergo, there being no King in 
 Israel, every man may do what is right in his own eyes. Is 
 this the hoary source of the herald's cry " Le roi est mart, 
 vive le roi " ? surely, the same horror of interregnum this ? 
 Watch, too, how that very word of theirs for " throne " 
 (Chipona) is eloquent of the precarious regal tenure of 
 the King. This ebony carved throne, though it could 
 grace a London drawing-room, really means : " You'll 
 tumble down," the idea being that the heights of auto- 
 cracy are too giddy. • A cannibal variant this, on the old 
 " uneasy-Ues-the-head-that-wears-a-crown " idea. Here 
 again, seemingly, you have a whisper of Biblical analogy, 
 in talking about " The enthroned on his royal ' you'll 
 tumble down,' " for Ezekiel uses this very word of The 
 Throne, " I will overturn, overturn, overturn . . . remove 
 the diadem and take off the crown." This triple usage of 
 the word " overturn " is precisely the " tottering throne ' 
 
THE PASSING OF OLD "PERHAPS" 245 
 
 idea. Their neighbours, the Mufungaites, being the 
 mountaineers of those parts, climb up the face of their 
 " munitions of rocks " at an angle of 80° with their royal 
 death. There, far up in the wind-swept ancestral cave, 
 they all lie roUed up in the " last mat." Curious, that far 
 away into the penetralia of cannibal life, you meet that old 
 ghost, the eastern position ? " Head pointing to the 
 east, sir," is what some old ceremonious elder will whisper 
 in your ear at a negro burial function. A whisper all this 
 of the far past when in the desert dreary Israel " pitched 
 their tents towards the sun rising." The western sky of 
 sunset is the same word as " the spirit world," so this means 
 that the Flanders phrase " gone west " is borrowed from 
 the black man. 
 
 But better far than these bumptious burials of King 
 Somebody is the chance a Missionary gets all over the 
 country by the graveside of the hundreds of little Africans 
 dead in innocency. What more appropriate of their end 
 than to open the Bible at its end and see how Heaven exalts 
 all such " insignij&cants " ? For death is the royal reverser 
 and here in the closing chapters of the Word (" Eevelation " 
 indeed !) I find God, in one pungent pen-stroke, reverses 
 things in that sarcastic phrase, " I saw the dead (1) small 
 and (2) great." Mark you, there is a triple ending here, 
 end of baby's earthly Ufe, end of the world, and end of the 
 Bible. And here on the edge of Eternity the tedious old 
 conventionalities are gone for ever; no longer pigmy 
 man, strutting even up to the grave's edge and talking 
 tall about the " great and small." I say, here in the 
 Bible's last book, here out on The Edge where we plunge 
 ofE from the planet earth, here it is not once but five tell- 
 tale times God gives us the other way round phrasing, 
 " the dead (1) small and (2) great." Therefore, this smaU- 
 and-great point is far too obviously intrusive to be ignored 
 as a hair-splitting ineptitude ; do not the five recurrences 
 force you to face them ? All this I gush at baby's grave- 
 side in the mosquito marsh, and insist that we should not 
 be surprised one little bit when we recall that this last 
 grave-side document in the Bible bears the name of " The 
 Unveiling." That is to say, up goes the veil, and in goes 
 
246 THE PASSING OF OLD "PERHAPS" 
 
 our gaze to the Eternity that tvirns topsy-turvy all the 1, 
 2, 3 arrangements of tedious little pall-bearing man ; five 
 times, I repeat, this " small-and-great " transposition is 
 used with a repetition that rings out God's own ratifica- 
 tion of reversal. And in each of these consistent five the 
 lesser precedes the greater in the land where " a Uttle child 
 shall lead them," where " of such is the Kingdom of 
 Heaven." 
 
 " Solomon, whit of thy glory ? it's gone in the wind. 
 Babylon, what of thy story ? it's gone in the mnd." 
 
 This means, of course, that there can be no such being as 
 a " heathen " baby ; heathenism is a thing you cannot be 
 born into, but only grow up into. Born in it, yes, but it can- 
 not be born in baby. " I saw the dead, small and great," 
 means that the Bible put Heaven's V.C. in the little coflfins 
 of every child killed in an air raid. " Of such is the King- 
 dom of Heaven " means that the smaller you are the higher 
 you go ; the pyramid is narrowing to the top. Yes, these 
 poor old Africans drink it in by the open grave I helped to 
 dig myself, when I tell them that the big boasters get their 
 place at last, and it is the last place. No, I have not gone 
 ofi on a word ; that all this exegesis is as austere as it is 
 authentic you can prove by tyiug it down to the lone word 
 of words, " Eternity." Now, here is a word only once used 
 in the Bible, yet preachers thunder it out thousands of 
 times, whereas the unabashed Book only gives it one men- 
 tion. Face, then, this one-and-only usage of the word 
 and see how it bears on our " small-and-great " hypothe- 
 sis. A mere glance sets any sinking sense of appreciation 
 at ease ; here you have it. " Thus saith the high and lofty 
 One that inhabiteth Eternity. ... I dwell in the high and 
 holy place, with him also that is of a contrite and humble 
 spirit." 
 
CHAPTER XIX 
 LIVINGSTONE'S "LAST SPONGE 
 
 Livingstone in his medical ■profession 
 had found out that medicine need not be 
 nauseous to he effective. So, only much 
 more so, in his " Last Journals " 
 moralising : sunny Africa -puts as much 
 sun into it as sermon. 
 
" We now end 1866. It has not been so fruitful or useful as I 
 intended. Will try to do better in 1867, and be better, more gentle 
 and loving ; and may the Almighty, to whom I commit my way, 
 bring my desires to pass, and prosper me ! Let all the sins of '66 
 be blotted out for Jesus' sake." 
 
 Livingstone. 
 
 " May He who was full of grace and truth impress His character 
 in mine. Grace — eagerness to show favour ; truth — truthfulness, 
 sincerity, honour— for His mercy's sake," 
 
 Idem. 
 
CHAPTEE XIX 
 LIVINGSTONE'S "LAST SPONGE" 
 
 LEAVING tliem on the far east, we have given all 
 Livingstone's " sponges " (i.e. water-sodden mor- 
 asses) the sUp by choosing a different time, differ- 
 ent place. In keeping well up from the marshes near 
 longitude 29° there is a gratifying facility about the pace 
 we are making ; weeks for his months, land for his waste 
 of waters. (He lost half a month alone by a guide's useless 
 detour !) Had he only kept to his old trail straight south, 
 he would have seen England again. But what explorer 
 ever took the same route twice ? Why leave plums to 
 be picked by someone else ? Nevertheless, when down in 
 Kavende, I resolved to cut across near the west shore 
 to get my first picture of the sorrows of his end. Lake 
 Bengweulu begins rather indefinitely about fifteen miles 
 from here over the plains ; watch the new spelling in the 
 two terminal " uu " ; all Livingstone's use of " o " really 
 equates our Italian " u." I press rather pertinaciously 
 this matter of African vowels, for when Stanley heard of 
 Livingstone's death he blandly mistook Ghitimbwa for 
 Chitambo, Land's End for John o' Groats, and ran off a 
 long erroneous description of the wrong spot because of 
 wrong spelling. He never came down here at all, never even 
 reached the south end of Tanganyika, hence his ludicrous 
 error of mistaking Chitambwa's for Chitambo's, South 
 Tanganyika for South Bangweulu. 
 
 Yet England seems to like this sort of " travellers' 
 twaddle," and the men who resolutely remain on to live 
 and die for these lands stifle many an impolite yawn at the 
 errors, easy errors, of these run-in and run-out explorers. 
 His advance is usually notified by an avant-courier with 
 the usual S.O.S, missive : must have food for his men, must 
 
 249 
 
250 LIVINGSTONE'S "LAST SPONGE" 
 
 have so many canoes for so many negroes at the Lualaba 
 crossing. And so on for him to get on. Then the great 
 greenhorn himself arrives : two words overheard between 
 master and man, only two, being quite enough to teU the 
 tale that he, Mr. Bombast, is living in a linguistic fog, 
 easy and endless errors because he is guessing ingloriously 
 all his African data. Worst of all : when he does frankly 
 sit down and listen greedily to your story, hours and hours 
 of it — I say, worst of aU, is his ultimate distortion of your 
 tale in the inevitable book he publishes. But there, let 
 us stick to our chronicle. 
 
 Three or four villages, Kalasa's dependencies, lie on the 
 road, the last on the edge of thin forest bordering the 
 savanna. For three hours a long difficult marsh is en- 
 countered, at many points looking like a lagoon. This 
 marsh, the natives say, is characteristic of Bangweulu in 
 its southern reaches in the floods, the problem being to find 
 where the wash of prussian blue is to be laid ofi, not on. 
 The natives in their lowly way have done a good thing in 
 engineering here. Unlike the usual African custom of 
 stolidly staring Nature in the face and attempting no sub- 
 jugation of its forces, the whole community, answering this 
 harsh challenge of Nature, turned out and threw up a long 
 earthen weir right through the marsh, joining the one strip 
 of dry land to the other. Along the backbone of this bank 
 you go, the marsh being on either hand, and the Blondin 
 art is to find and keep just the proper poise, otherwise 
 you plunge. 
 
 Fish, of course, was the primary idea of this great weir 
 and every wet season fabulous quantities are caught in the 
 wicker baskets. Mostly all coarse Siluroids, though. 
 These mud-fish belie even the old saw about a fish out of 
 water for I am informed they can live long months under 
 the sun-baked surface of a dried-up stream. Before the 
 water finally disappears, the creature drives a burrow 
 downwards into the mud of the river bed, then turning its 
 tail up so as to cover its nose, and encased in slime, it 
 passes into a deep sleep which may endure for a whole 
 year, or longer. Nor are they afone in this. A consider- 
 able number of other fishes have, in like manner, contrived 
 
LIVINGSTONE'S "LAST SPONGE" 251 
 
 to tide over long periods of drought ; as, for example, the 
 limg-fisli {Lifidosiren), the serpent heads, the climbing 
 perches and the gouramis as well as several of the cat- 
 fishes. The marsh crocodiles also, for example, when the 
 stream in which they have been living is reduced to its 
 last trickle of water, either migrate or bury themselves in 
 the mud of the river bed. In the latter case this is soon 
 baked hard, and here perforce those which have elected to 
 stay must remain till released by the restoration of the 
 stream by the rains. Thus they may remain prisoners for 
 months, for, once the mud has hardened, escape is im- 
 possible. In like manner the water-tortoise {Clemmys 
 leporosa), to survive prolonged drought, passes into a state 
 of torpor. When, by degrees, the stream is reduced to a 
 series of stinking pools, these tortoises seek such shelter as 
 they can find under ledges of rock, remaining, to all 
 appearance, dead for months. 
 
 This marsh crossed, you strike Kampolombo Lagoon once 
 perhaps the most south-easterly contour of Bangweulu. 
 Vena Kavende villages are on this side of the Bay, a stretch 
 of wire-grass savanna separating village and lake. Nkwa ! 
 Nhwa ! Nhwa is the metallic sound heard as you approach 
 these " city " villages, the men hard at work beating out 
 the bark cloth with a wooden mallet. This soon accumu- 
 lates in little packets in their huts and of two varieties ; 
 the better sort is made from the " mutava " tree afforesting 
 the villages, the coarser in great quantity from the first 
 " musamha " tree met with in the forest. The Vatwa are 
 the poor riverine population, amphibia, they might almost 
 be called, so very much in the water are they. Even on a 
 dark night you can see him far out, a cresset fire flaring 
 luridly in the bow. Fish thus attracted are speared. They 
 rarely cultivate, scarcely build anything worthy of the 
 name of hut, and come over here to barter fish for flour. 
 
 Vena Kavende get their wives from among them, that too 
 being only another bit of barter. The Chief is linked with 
 every hamlet in his country by marriage, his Queen being 
 often some hard-working body promoted from the ranks. 
 The Lake is known in its northern limits as Chifunabudi 
 and here in the south as Bangweulu, the last two " uu " 
 
252 LIVINGSTONE'S "LAST SPONGE" 
 
 (may I rub it in ?) being most distinct. Translated, it 
 has in it tte note of immensity, and this the Lake's full name 
 brings out. The whole name really is " Lake Bangweulu, 
 wavikilwanshimangomwana," i.e. " the journey is so long 
 across that you must take aboard provisions." This is 
 neither the fantasy nor poetry of the globe-trotter, but 
 plain philology. 
 
 " Ye have heard of the patience of Job," but know also 
 that here are people who have that same virtue miles long, 
 centuries old. Himger gnaws, cold numbs, and they are 
 down at the very bottom of life's hill yet give never a 
 twitch. I am prepared to be told that any analogy between 
 these blacks and our far-away whites is only a studied 
 straining after efEect. Yet just under my nose I see two 
 stout " old 'uns " binding Britons to blacks : (1) " salary " 
 the noun, and (2) " pecuniary " the adjective. For here 
 (1) they pay for everything in salt, the real old root for 
 " salaij." And (2) as all the Chief's wealth is in his cattle, 
 when these die off he is literally in 'pecuniary trouble, from 
 fecu, cattle. Thus " folks is folks " and the round world 
 akin. When Livingstone died down here with his " one 
 shilling and sixpence " to the good, that or any coin had 
 very cold comfort in it. These natives never had cash 
 currency. Therefore, never put a monetary value on any 
 such coin. Looking astutely one day at the king's head 
 graven on the first shilling they ever saw, I wondered what 
 their idea of this novel thing was, this " compressed 
 sweat " called a coin of the realm. They were five men 
 doing this scrutinising, one coin passing from man to 
 man, all ten eyes on the unwinking two eyes of the graven 
 face of the king. Then it came out. The five men snapped 
 out the same opinion about money, and in so speaking 
 they reached the bed-rock of all economics, revenues and 
 riches : " That, oh ! that is the face that never smiles." Nor 
 does the face of a dead man smile. Nor does the face on 
 this dead coin. " Cold cash," for the dead are cold. Busi- 
 ness is business, and there is no sentiment in silver currency 
 — ^is there ? 
 
 Nature by way of relenting at the lowness of the Lake's 
 shore makes amends by spreading this flood for many a 
 
LIVINGSTONE'S "LAST SPONGE" 253 
 
 weary mile among the dead-level plains. Here in the 
 great marsh. (" Livingstone's Last," let us call it) the natives 
 did the deed and actually killed sixteen elephants in one 
 day when the river was in flood. This great tribal " kill " is 
 an annual thing with aU the sporting significance of oxir 
 English August 12, September 1, or October 1. The long 
 spear- grass is jealously watched up to the moment when, 
 with one fire-brand, the chief officially sends it up in smoke. 
 Thus hounded on to their doom, the miles and miles of 
 roaring flame make the first glitter of water a joyous 
 relief to driven-to-desperation Jumbo. Now it is these 
 monsters with gleaming white ivory get into the young bog 
 far up-stream, thinking no doubt it is just one of their 
 ordinary little puddles for play. But, alas ! they get in- 
 volved from deep to deeper, deeper to deepest, and finally 
 cease to flounder from sheer elephantine exhaustion. 
 Out dart the canoes, torpedo boats versus dreadnoughts, 
 the chuckling fishermen all armed with hippo javelins, 
 and even little boys with axes and bows and arrows. Then 
 begins the massacre, the resultant foul fat and meat slowly 
 poisoning the community for months. 
 
 Thus sped the quid fro quo killing, for of course all this 
 is red revenge, nothing more. It is not uncommon to come 
 on a village wrecked by elephants, villagers chased out, 
 grain-stores pulled down from their pedestal, grain strewn 
 like gravel all over the derelict town. But this is rarer 
 than the persistent damage done to crops in a single night, 
 damage so deplorable that a local famine looms ahead for 
 the red-millet devotees. Eland and roan make things hard 
 enough, but an elephant is prince of all pirates, and doubles 
 the devastation by first destroying the fields, then finishes 
 them off by pulling down the town. In later days many a 
 hunter made and unmade himself with these elephants. 
 There was the man who killed his 112 and elephant No. 113 
 killed him. The man who half-killed one, followed it up, 
 saw it shanaming death, began to measure its tusks when 
 the half- killed monster turned and wholly-killed the hunter. 
 The other, who although badly shaken crawls out alive 
 from under the monster's body. Also the incredible ele- 
 phant who seemed so decidedly dead that they cut off both 
 
254 LIVINGSTONE'S "LAST SPONGE" 
 
 trunk and tail, tlien (like Mark Twain's " the report was 
 premature ") it rushed ofE. Fifty-two men it takes to carry 
 a male weighing two tons ; but the bones are spongy and 
 meat so full of water that when dried it is about half its 
 beefy bulk. The meat is stringy though and only the 
 trunk, feet and heart make good eating. 
 
 They travel Indian file against the wind, snip ofE food to 
 right and left when on the move, and cleverly take a dose 
 of salts in the form of a saline earth containing nitrate 
 of potash, rock salt, etc. This purges the short and large 
 intestinal worms. More than two miles away each fruit 
 tree or edible scrub sends its marconigrams down the 
 wind, hence the straight tracks an elephant always makes. 
 It is literally a " trunk " call, for the " meat messages " are 
 streaming in on him from two, even three, miles away. 
 Water calls, pumpkins call, the young bamboo shoots call, 
 and, so to speak, the dinner bell is ringing across all that 
 distance up his trunk receiver. As I have said, this accounts 
 for an elephant's straight-as-an-arrow tracks : intervening 
 trees, anthills, and obstacles are brushed aside en route 
 for the one grim objective of edibles. For, remember, 
 " grim " is the word : each elephant needs nearly eight 
 hundredweight of food every twenty-four hours, so his biU 
 of fare is a big concern. This means, of course, many miles 
 of elephantine travel when grass, reeds, bark and their 
 favourite thorn shrubs are eaten with sorghum, maize, 
 pumpkins and even tobacco. Even tobacco, and lots of 
 it. His red-letter months, however, are December, May, 
 June and September, when his favourite fruits are ripe 
 and swallowed whole. 
 
 It may assist the reader in understanding the trend of 
 this narrative if I here explain this somewhat Boy Scout 
 digression on elephants. This tale of African quadrupeds 
 brings us abruptly to our black bipeds on Lake Mweru. 
 History attests that the elephant did it all and the great 
 Nkuva dynasty is really founded on ivory. The first usurper 
 of that name was a mere adventurer hailing from the 
 Vemba country in the east, his quest being ivory precisely 
 as Mushidi came from the same direction seeking copper. 
 Thus, like the Indian who believes the world is carried on 
 
LIVINGSTONE'S "LAST SPONGE" 255 
 
 the back of an elephant, this little world of Mweru is also 
 seen to be superimposed on Jumbo. And precisely as the 
 same Indian thinks the elephant walketh not on air, but 
 only carries the earth because it in turn is borne aloft on 
 the top of a tortoise, even so, only much more so, with 
 Lake Mweru before the ivory craze. Ere ever a Nkuva 
 sighted the curvatures of its shores, there were aboriginal 
 " tortoise " chiefs who slept on in the interior, never 
 dreaming that plans were being hatched out east for 
 the wresting of the Lake from them. 
 
 Dotted all round its shores, each of these little raga- 
 muffin kings played for his own hand, thus ensuring a popu- 
 lation riddled with discontent. Such was the aboriginal 
 germ of government found by Nkuva, the adventurer, on 
 Lake Mweru, and no wonder the elephant got on the tor- 
 toise's back so easily. Nor was there bloodshed in it all. 
 For when this ivory hunter struck the east shore of the 
 Lake near the delta of the Kalungwizi, the wide waste of 
 pitiless waters that met his gaze made him resolve, not 
 to fight but rather, to worm his way among the Shila 
 people. Therefore, avoiding the provocative policy of 
 begging a boon from them, he specialised on the most 
 worthless thing in the whole interior, to wit, ivory, or 
 " the bone with no marrow fat in it." Now, if all great 
 victories are won by following the line of least resistance, 
 then Nkuva deserved his literal " walk-over." Did ever 
 fisher chief, ever in his wildest dreams, guess that mere 
 worthless ivory had brought this keen-eyed hunter ? 
 What they really dreaded was that the foreigner had come 
 to steal the elephant's heef from them, for truth to tell, 
 one or two tons of meat from one Jumbo is no small 
 butcher's bUl. The real bones, too, make a choice negro 
 broth, for are they not fuU of fat ? — but as for ivory ! 
 
 So it came to pass when Nkuva crossed to the Shila 
 shore he found ivory riches beyond the dreams of avarice. 
 Bestrewing the plains lo ! the discarded tusks bleaching in 
 the sun, the accumulated elephants' teeth of years. Thus 
 he read them the old lesson that the very ivory despised 
 and rejected of aborigines, the same made he the corner- 
 stone of his kingship. Here was the thin edge of the great 
 
256 LIVINGSTONE'S "LAST SPONGE" 
 
 coining wedge. So thin, indeed, that it seemed nor edge 
 nor wedge at all. With a fatal facility for sharp busiaess 
 methods, Nkuva, dissoMng in philanthropic smiles, let 
 them gormandise on their tons of beef and broth, he 
 merely claiming as a beggar's boon " the only two bones in 
 an elephant that have no marrow fat in them." This 
 ivory, of course, he speedily passed out east, and in return 
 received old Crimea " tower " guns and English powder 
 from the Arabs, thus ensuring the Nkuva ascendancy all 
 round Mweru. 
 
 Some objected, of course, for what about the salt deposits, 
 and would the new-comer deal high-handedly therewith ? 
 Away down in the marshes of the south end, Mudimba 
 adroitly begged the usurper not to approach his salt pans, 
 and calmly proposed to give Nkuva the real recipe for the 
 " growing of salt from seed." Sure enough, his embassy 
 crossed to the east shore bearing two gifts of " seed salt " 
 and " seed fish." These latter were natural and normal 
 enough, a jar of water, full of sprats with instructions to 
 let the young fish loose in the fijst stream, then would they 
 bring forth and multiply. Next came the curious bag of 
 " seed salt," with instructions as solemn as stringent that 
 this salt, ordinary salt, was merely to be deposited in a 
 hole in the ground and forthwith would appear a rich 
 harvest of — chloride of sodium ! But Nkuva at this stage 
 had " grown a moustache," as they say on the Lake, and 
 was no longer the beaming black adventurer of his " salad " 
 days. Had he not fortified his position in the country with 
 an Arab alliance ? So they fought it out at the south end, 
 and finally after some months of war Mudimba's coun- 
 sellors got him really to believe that, after all, this indeed 
 must be a stupid sort of strife that wrangled for bones — 
 bones, forsooth, not even of the genuine Mother Hubbard 
 sort, but merely the worthless ones minus marrow fat. 
 And so they buried the hatchet on the clear stipulation 
 that Nkuva would never tamper with their aboriginal 
 rights to the beef and bones of the elephant, this pact of 
 peace being closed by the usual marriage on such occasions ; 
 usual, because the oldest custom on the Lake is this cement- 
 ing of intertribal peace by intermarriage. Again and 
 
LIVINGSTONE'S "LAST SPONGE" 257 
 
 again, a wild war has ended in wedding bells, wedding 
 drums, I mean, the old Spanish- Africano idea being that 
 if Castile is to be successfully united to Aragon, then must 
 the negro Ferdinand marry his black but comely Catherine. 
 
 " Sponge " was the word Livingstone coined for the 
 thing that finally murdered him ; this curious species of 
 wild asparagus belonging to the Cyferaceae makes the 
 navigation of many an African river impossible. But 
 " bog " is not the right word ; a sort of floating vegetable 
 spring-mattress it is, hence the name Ntemfuma, the bounc- 
 ing one. A sure death-trap to foreigners, and alive with 
 leeches, this is the reason why the whole tribe have built 
 " dummy " villages round the edge. Far out into the 
 treacherous heart of these marshy mazes they have each 
 their own sacred spot whither they flee on attack, and 
 leading up to these retreats are mysterious little tracks 
 known only to wily aboriginal eyes. A foreigner's false 
 step means a watery grave. The natives insist (but what 
 won't they say ?) that I am the only white man who ever 
 reached the centre, and the chief danger I found was that 
 at noonday one was deep down in pestiferous gloom, the 
 black bog was full of too many inviting little avenues 
 along which you wrongly conjecture you can pass. These 
 are named " The paths of death," and the human otters 
 who grub there in the mud can throw taunts at their enemies 
 from the invisible hole in the heart of the marsh. Millions 
 of frogs are there, croakers these who have taught the tribe 
 its manners. Vulgar like their many frogs, lo ! the tribes- 
 men sit on the edge of their morass croaking out one note 
 Pay ! Pay ! then — ^plump ! into the mud again. 
 
 They despise Livingstone's Gospel do these frog-folks, 
 but what would the nightingale care if the toad despised 
 her singing ? She would stHl sing on, and leave the cold 
 toad to his mud and misery. " When," said Carlyle, 
 " Solomon's temple was building, ten thousand sparrows 
 sitting on the trees aroimd declared most chirpingly that 
 it was entirely wrong ; nevertheless it got finished. 
 
 But to business : farther along this so-to-call-it " sponge " 
 softens into blue belts of water and new troubles arise 
 in the canoeing of these. Firstly and oh ! so forcibly you 
 
 17 
 
258 LIVINGSTONE'S "LAST SPONGE" 
 
 find there is nothing to canoe in, so you strip a tree and 
 make your own bark boat. Made in an hour, the thing is 
 so coggley and cracked that one tooth of a hippo can tear 
 it to tatters. So far so good ; you have barked your boat, 
 the next phase is more bewildering, for here comes the most 
 whimsical of all these happenings. A rebel to the last, 
 this bog has betrayed us a second time : given your cockle- 
 shell canoe, the problem now stands how to produce your 
 water. You had no boat for your lake (betrayal No. 1), 
 now you have no lake for your boat (betrayal No. 2). 
 What has happened ? The whole aspect of the quondam 
 waterway has changed behind our back, a few fleeting 
 hours robbing you of both a way on the water and water 
 on the way. First it was nothing to canoe in ; now it is 
 nowhere to canoe to. This is how it happened. Lying 
 down to doze ofi fatigue, we left our bark boat on a sort 
 of shore and the last glimpse we have is the deep lapis 
 lazuli blue water all round. Awakening later, we find 
 ourselves in a tangled jungle of " sudd," the Lake choked 
 with dense bewildering marsh. Be it understood, this 
 solid mass during our sleep has sailed in to shore as a fleet 
 of separate islands to combine into terra firma, only and 
 obviously as firma, I mean, as a bog can be called terra. 
 
 Then begins a curious kind of aquatic leap-frog a la Peary 
 trying for the Pole, only for floatiag ice read floatiag is- 
 lands of " Nile sudd." The Arctic circle seems the last 
 place to seek an accurate analogy of African life, but, 
 excepting always the erratic extremes of Polar cold and 
 equatorial heat, here you have the same old fight, sledging 
 your bark boat over a constantly changing surface of 
 moving marsh. Two, three, or four islets combining and 
 dispersing in as many minutes ; a channel of half an hour 
 ago is now choked with marsh grass and your bark boat 
 " bog-bound " along with it. " The key that locks is the 
 key that opens," runs the native proverb, and those can- 
 tankerous currents that liberate are the same that hem us 
 in among new networks of moving marsh. Nor does your 
 boat rock ; it is the islets that do the rocking, any attempt 
 to land sending this floating freak a-bobbing all over. 
 Happily my absurdly abbreviated trousers cannot be much 
 
'I'HK \K\V AND 
 1. The old-time folk.s. 'i. The wayside 
 ol' Bunkeya rebuilt. 
 
 I'ifH; OLD. 
 
 Uospel meeting'. :). The old city 
 A whole family of hopefuls. .J. The old way of feeding 
 the folks. 
 
 ■25 8] 
 
LIVINGSTONE'S "LAST SPONGE" 259 
 
 wet, for there are not many inches to wet, but my leap-frog 
 boatmen have managed the minimum. Ashore their 
 favourite garments are the fashionable monkey-skins, but 
 here afloat they almost only wear their own skins minus 
 any tailors' trimmings. And if you think my native negroes 
 are embarrassed you certainly do not do them justice, 
 the only painful point being the monkey-skins ashore. 
 " Nature's pensioners," is the name of Messrs. Monkey, 
 and here it is they apologise for having deprived these 
 monkeys of their overcoats, the reason running that the 
 said monkeys deprived the negroes of their corn. There- 
 fore, these animals having created quite a fashion in food 
 for Luban com, the Lubans retaliate by making a fashion 
 in dress of monkeys' skins. 
 
 Under the gnarled fig-trees sit the old fellows, the 
 " Messrs. Hitherto," of whom Livingstone wrote : " I 
 like to see them weaving or spinning or rec linin g imder these 
 glorious canopies as much as I love to see our more civi- 
 fised people lolHng on their sofas or ottomans." Far 
 from the futilities of town life, he saw some slumbering 
 nobleness in the assorted mentalities of these toothless 
 old men whose wide world is contracted within the tribal 
 boundary. One of them had actually heard of books and 
 umbrellas, but had seen neither. Yet there he stood on, 
 and for, the spot where God had given " commandment 
 concerning his bones." Neither a nobody nor a know- 
 nothing, was he not skilled in soils, agriculture, hut-bmld- 
 ing, basket-making, pottery, manufacture of bark-cloth 
 and skins for clothing as also nets, traps and cordage ? 
 All this with fishing and hunting, and never a gad-about 
 move away from the old stockade on the edge of the 
 forest. After all, even the clock that stands stiU points 
 right twice in the twenty-four hours. And, clock or no 
 clock, is it not generally two o'clock — ^just about that 
 time in the afternoon ? 
 
 Certainly Livingstone was the last to laugh at these 
 hearty old farmers and fishers when he recalled the inscrip- 
 tion far away in a little churchyard in England : " Here 
 lies Peter Bacon, horn a man and died a grocer." Later on 
 these ancients, haggard lines multiplying on their brow, are 
 
260 LIVINGSTONE'S "LAST SPONGE" 
 
 the stock critics of missions and the very last to yield. 
 Let one or two young folks in town break with heathendom 
 and at once these aged monitors demand from them a 
 Christianity in best apple-pie order. But when they do 
 own up to the conversion of a neighbour, the breezy ring 
 of their frankness is refreshing. TMs time he gets a parable 
 out of the fact that no native hut has a window, therefore 
 no streak of daybreak can enter his dark hut. It is only 
 the daybreak sounds that get in on him to tell what the 
 eye cannot see. This is his picture of a man's hidden heart 
 and its conversion, this the simile that seems to invite 
 elaboration. " Yes," said an old sapient, singling out 
 one of them, " that man is saved, and why do I know it ? 
 Why do I know it is daybreak without even leaving my 
 dark hut to see if there are streaks of dawn ? / hnow by 
 the singing of the sunrise birds. Their music gets into the 
 blackness of my house without my bothering to get out and 
 see if the east is reddening. So, too, a Christian and this 
 new heart of his : I cannot get in, past bone and blood, to 
 inspect it, but the new heart comes out in song like the 
 sunrise birds." 
 
 Yet this old gent, is a hardened sinner who throws ofE 
 this while he twirls an imaginary moustache. Very tena- 
 cious of their status are these dogmatic old men and the 
 young upstarts have a rough time at their hands. They 
 have no Sinai, no fifth commandment, and the conamonest 
 wrangle is between father and son. As they are so pro- 
 vokingly quotable, let me repeat a conversation overheard : 
 
 The son : " Oh, old man ! we differ ; let us take our case 
 to the court of the elders." 
 
 The elders (with studied rebuke) : " In this case we 
 appoint your father to the presidency of the eldership." 
 
 The son : " Oh, I'm of age ; look at the height of my 
 shoulders." 
 
 The elders : " Shall the shoulders be higher than the 
 head ? " (i.e. his father). 
 
CHAPTER XX 
 THE VATWA AMPHIBIA 
 
 Written on the sfot, these recollections 
 are based on collections. All the trouble 
 begins when you try in a dreamy 
 manner to recollect the thing you 
 jailed to collect in your notebook. 
 " Down with it and done with it" is 
 the good old lead-pencil rule. 
 
" A darkened soul that shuns the light, 
 A heart indifferent to the right — 
 And this, and only this is night," 
 
 " Not all that herqlds rake from coffined clay ; 
 Nor florid prose nor honeyed lines of rhyme. 
 Can blazon evil deeds or consecrate a crime." 
 
 " Yes, one unquestioned text we read ; 
 All doubt beyond, all fear above: 
 Nor crackling pile nor cursing creed 
 Can burn or blot it — God is love ! " 
 
CHAPTER XX 
 
 THE VATWA AMPHIBIA 
 
 ^T^HEY make their nets from Iwimhwe fibre, then 
 I christen them with names as vainglorious as 
 "*■ a British battleship. " The gobbler " {Mina 
 tonse) ; " The all-the-town supplier " (Chihushya chaalo 
 chonse) ; and so on through all the sinuosities of fishing 
 swagger heard in a Yarmouth gin-palace. There is religion 
 of a sort in all this, hence the first basket is placed on the 
 ancestral spirit's grave. For do not these mediators, 
 " the good ones," live out beyond the edge of the planet 
 earth, out at some half-way house to God ? Therefore, 
 have " a say " with God on mundane matters, particularly 
 family affairs ? Particularly family affairs, for (1) who 
 indeed brought that left-behind family into being if not 
 the said ancestor flus the said God ? Therefore (2) the 
 ancestor who did so co-operate with God unto the bringing 
 of them into the world, who (3) did likewise co-operate 
 with that same God unto the leaving them behind in that 
 same world, wide and weary world, lo, (4) why should not 
 the same ancestor and the same God still continue the same 
 co-operation in the interests of the bereaved humans ? 
 
 These four interlocutors, the key to the blackbrains theory 
 of mediation, invite the Missionary to proclaim the dove- 
 tailing doctrine of Christ the Mediator between God and 
 man. Shut up into one sentence, the kernel idea is the 
 negro attempt to rob the awful and unknown spirit-world 
 of its double sting of loneliness and frowning distance. 
 Does it not envelop him, and out from the unseen depths 
 thereof are not daily darts showered against him ? Hence 
 his solution in this bridging process, i.e. the boast that a 
 deceased mother is still linked with her living children by 
 the very blood she has bequeathed them. That is to say, 
 
 263 
 
264 THE VATWA AMPHIBIA 
 
 yonder in that frowning lonely spirit- world, menacing his 
 life at every turn, he has actually a blood kinsman as days- 
 man and representative. She, too, was once hungry, once 
 weary, once jagged with earthly pains and penalties. To 
 prove this link as both intimate and dear I have heard a 
 man murmur in spirit-worship, " Oh, mother, behold this 
 blood now coursing in my body ; thou didst not merely 
 bequeath it unto me, but it is thee." 
 
 Here, then, you find the tenacity of belief that he, the 
 living being, can bridge the awful gulf because the dead 
 did not entirely die — did they not leave some of their own 
 blood on this earthly side of the gulf as an intentional 
 link ? There, then, is his bridge across the chasm, and if 
 you urge that it is not real, but merely his own mad con- 
 jecture, he will retort that the bridging initiative was not 
 his at all, but rather that of his own guardian spirit, who 
 will not (because cannot) sever the link between the living 
 and the dead. 
 
 Leaving my wife not far from the spot where Livingstone 
 wrote facetiously of a lion roaring at him, how does this 
 coincidence dovetail ? Tell me, can a lion only hinder, 
 not help us ? The answer comes from my wife, who with 
 a gratification that is almost gratitude speaks up for the 
 lion that certainly saved her life. She is just back from a 
 long trek across river, and at one stage would have been 
 hopelessly lost but for the intervention of a fierce-but- 
 friendly lion saving, instead of swallowing her. I am 
 painfully aware that here you have the incongruous carried 
 to the verge of the bizarre, but let the truth be told though 
 seventy sinners shrug their shoulders in disdain. To 
 understand the situation you must look at the map and see 
 where away at the south end of this Lake the great elephant 
 marshes begin. After a long day canoeing this sea of 
 uncertainty, at last towards evening, in order to reach land 
 and camp, they entered the final phase of thirteen-feet- 
 high bulrushes with nothing visible save a little ribbon of 
 sky overhead. In they twisted into this maze of marsh 
 and having no compass they were soon lost as to direction ; 
 lost, I mean, because the canoe had to take each and any 
 new twisting phase of the waterway that presented itself 
 
THE VATWA AMPHIBIA 265 
 
 — that or nothing, and nothing at that. So round and round 
 they go like a watchspring, then in exasperation night comes 
 down with its many mosquitoes, but where, oh, where is 
 land ? In a voice that seemed to come up from his ten 
 toes the guide declared they were lost. But ashore they 
 must get, and no amount of scolding volubly and without 
 reserve can mend matters. Then comes the discovery 
 that makes no claim to be original : what about prayer ? 
 and what about the dear old jingle : 
 
 " Prayers and praises go in pairs. 
 
 They have praises who have prayers" f 
 
 The answer is so authentic that no number of scoffers 
 can gainsay same ; no ! despite all their allusiveness and 
 politely impudent personalities. Mark you, what is wanted 
 in this desperate situation of lost bearings is some clear 
 call from the direction of land : but how can a human voice 
 respond from a lonely spot where never human dwelliag 
 was ? Then it was God heard prayer : like the two buckets 
 in the well, up goes the one and down goes the other ; up 
 goes the request and down comes the answer — a lion roars. 
 For a lion means land above all things, and the non- 
 aquatic Hon saved the situation. Right off they swing round 
 the canoe and head straight for the roaring lion ; no fear 
 of being eaten by it, none at all. Would the God who sent 
 the wild beast to deliver, allow that same beast to harm 
 them ? StiQ it roars and still they approach it, but as 
 sure as they are advancing, so surely is the roaring reced- 
 ing ; receding, yes, because Christ is interceding. Surely 
 in this lion running away at the precise point where it had 
 finished its God-sent service ; I say, surely here again we 
 have an exalted and touching proof that the Infinite God 
 is the God of the infinitesimal. Even the rough old fisher- 
 man was forced to see God in it. There is something 
 rather charming in a plaiu man's attempt to be ornate, yet 
 even he made quite a secular sermon out of it. He is one 
 of the sort who does not mind using God's name all day 
 provided you do so with none of the odious affability learnt 
 at the Mission. Yet now he owns up to a personal deliver- 
 ance when man's help was of no avail : in fact, lions loomed 
 
266 THE VATWA AMPHIBIA 
 
 so large for tlie moment that to him all the world seemed 
 to divide into three, and only three classes — The Biter, 
 The Bitten and The Unbitten ! Thus with all his quirks 
 and quirls and homely philosophy he testifies to what he 
 had neither part nor lot in, a blind man admiring the 
 rainbow. Certainly these old orators have the style of 
 genius if not the genius of style. 
 
 So you see how the God who overruled Satan at Calvary 
 once again got the sweet out of the bitter. For is he not 
 a " roaring lion seeking whom he may devour " ? And 
 was it not the very roar of this Hon that brought the needed 
 signal for dry land ? Thus the very roaring that is a scrip- 
 ture symbol for devouring was transformed into a sure mark 
 of mercy, for where a lion roars must be dry land. So God 
 rules by overruling ; all ill, weU ; aU bad, good ; and the 
 very worst, the very best. At the Cross where Satan roared 
 the loudest roar in all his devil-destiny, just there (and 
 justly there) God got the greatest glory of all. It was 
 farther up this self-same river the half-dead Livingstone 
 in a tropical shower-bath of marshes wrote with a dying 
 smile : "A lion wandered into this world of water and ant- 
 hills and roared night and morning as if very much dis- 
 gusted : we could sympathise with him ! " Amos put 
 it the wrong way round for Mrs. Crawford's case of succour : 
 " The lion hath roared, who wiU not fear ? " Say rather, 
 Mr. Amos, who will not rejoice in this hopelessly lost canoe 
 on hearing such a land signal ? For did not the same 
 herdman write, " Will a lion roar in the forest " (not in the 
 water) " when he hath no prey ? " So it all ends in a cres- 
 cendo of praise : even the young lions " seek their meat 
 from God," and that caU, carnivorous call from land, was 
 an assurance that the God who could feed Mr. Four Legs 
 would lead and feed Messrs. Two ditto. Pelis leo when he 
 neatly and dramatically sent out that saving call, not merely 
 hinted terra f/rma, but also announced a sort of WHd- 
 Beast Eestaurant where, to quote Brother Amos again, 
 " the shepherd taketh out of the mouth of the lion two legs 
 or the piece of an ear." 
 
 This Amos announcement agrees at any rate with my 
 wife's diary-item for the 3rd of the month. At the Chitile 
 
THE VATWA AMPHIBIA 267 
 
 River the dinner-bell rang in Heaven, and up in the fork 
 of an acacia tree lo ! you have a half-finished antelope 
 awaiting consumption in " the leopard's cupboard." 
 Not the Mugsby Junction Restaurant this, but the one at 
 the junction of the two main " forks " of a great tree, these 
 branching forks being the only things of that name they 
 provide at this Wild-Beast Restaurant. On climbing, 
 the boys found the usual hors d'ceuvres elimination of the 
 abdominal contents, but head, body and legs are all in 
 fijst-class condition, toughness at any rate a tale of the 
 past. Meantime, while one is up in the fork dislodging 
 the venison, his fellows, with guns at the ready, have made 
 a circle of iron round the tree awaiting the spring of the 
 leopard who is lurking somewhere in the long grass for his 
 venison to reach the " high " stage in his high cupboard. 
 If he can take it let him come and try, did he not kill the 
 antelope ? But we can kill him. This is the third time 
 the carnivora have freed us against all their feline fancy so 
 to do. Elijah knew something about this : we'll compare 
 notes anon. 
 
 This " Amos " sing-song may seem too repetitive in 
 character. But that good man was so keen a herdsman that 
 lions were in his lively line of business. Being in the same 
 sort of profession myself I rather cotton to his practical 
 phrasing of the matter ; they called him " a burden " 
 (= Amos), but he grew up to bear the burden of the whole 
 nation. And out in the bush, like Livingstone, he certainly 
 learned literature, for in his first and second chapters you 
 can find first-class strophes. (Lowth insists he is " not a 
 whit behind the very chief of the prophets," at any rate 
 he knows about lions, voila tout). May the God of Amos 
 grant that those who " shepherd " bipeds may likewise 
 specialise on the ways and wiles of The Lion who goeth 
 about seeking whom he may devour. 
 
 I agree with Sir Harry here : on this low-banked lagoon, 
 after incessant passes at Livingstone's old insect foes, 
 one is forced to face the fact that Africa belongs in some 
 sense to Beelzebub, Lord of flies. Do not flies lord it over 
 Africa ? The liberal assortment of these creatures could 
 conceivably infect you with every ailment in the Medical 
 
268 THE VATWA AMPHIBIA 
 
 Dictionary, If the white ants cannot undermine your 
 house, then their cousins, the warrior ants, will chase you 
 out of it. The beetles may fight shy of you, but they bore 
 your timber instead of " boring " you. The tiny ants do 
 not tamper with you because they mean to mess up your 
 jam and sugar. The ephemerides do not trouble you by 
 day because they mean to rise in clouds from the river by 
 night to swamp the soup and extinguish lamp or candle. 
 If the testse (morsitans) does not kill your dog, then the 
 other sort (palpalis) may give you sleeping sickness. The 
 blue-bottle fly's specialism is to spread blood-poisoning, 
 but if he miss the mark then the gad-flies and maddeniag 
 sand-flies wiU not fail to leave their card on you. 
 
 And so on and so on : the hornet politely leaves you 
 alone until it gets you ofi your guard, then pays up arrears 
 in one stab. The grubs left by the beetles eat ofi the roots 
 of flowers and plants underground, while aboveground 
 thousands of caterpillars left by moths and butterflies are 
 sucking the juices of anything green ; " blight " is the 
 useless word covering hosts of such small horticultural 
 enemies. Last of all (most of all, perhaps) you have my 
 friend the engagingly definite mosquito, a fair and frank 
 fighter, who soimds his bugle as advance warning. Wants 
 blood, your blood, and gives you a burning-freezing fever 
 as quid pro quo. Last, did I say ? Nay, a jigger just now 
 is tickling my third toe to intimate that no list of African 
 Zoology can be considered complete without a word of 
 warning against this burrowing flea which arrived in Africa 
 not so long ago, in the earlier " fifties," say. Ever since 
 the day it was unloaded from a West India-man in some 
 sand ballast at Ambriz, it has stuck to the sandy soil right 
 across Africa, and it is only when it loses its power of choos- 
 ing its sort of soil by burrowing in the human feet that it 
 spreads all over. First it tackles the toes, then it tackles 
 whole towns and chases the people out. 
 
 AU of which hints rather loudly how this hot Africa 
 is cool enough to notify all comers that any business they 
 transact with it must be on the hair-trigger basis. At any 
 rate, this zoological " true bill " becomes more actual than 
 artful when you pin together the prophet Isaiah's two Afri- 
 
THE VATWA AMPHIBIA 269 
 
 can snapshots : (1) " Ah, the land of the rustling of wings 
 which is beyond the rivers of Ethiopia," (2) " whose land 
 the rivers have spoiled." Plain as print, here you have a 
 mere matter of cause and consequence, for (1) these dozens 
 of rivers leaping over inadequate banks and weltering in 
 the marshes surely equate " whose lands the rivers have 
 spoiled " ? Moreover, and just as surely, this cause finds 
 its consequence (2) in the millions of mad flying things 
 generated in the putrefying marshes, " Ah, the land of the 
 rusthng of wings which is beyond the rivers of Ethiopia." 
 Besides, when the same prophet in the same breath goes on 
 to snapshot the occupants of these rivers as " a people 
 scattered and peeled," did he not hit off the African 1 
 Or when he snapped them again with God's kodak in the 
 words " a people terrible from the beginning hitherto " ? 
 Or even, better still, when he gave the whole of their hard 
 history in eight, and only eight, words, " a nation meted 
 out and trodden under foot " ? No wonder Livingstone 
 read the Bible four times through when he was in Manyema : 
 this downright, honest, four-square picture of Central 
 Africa explains so much. 
 And now we near the end. 
 
CHAPTER XXI 
 THE ENDLESS END 
 
 Even the decent sort of fellow who 
 has a healthy prejudice in favour of 
 minding his own business must face the 
 Livingstone dictum that God has a 
 business in His own earth. And ours it 
 is to be about our Father's business. 
 
" The spirit of Missions is the spirit of our Master : the very genius 
 of His religion." 
 
 Livingstone. 
 
 " / am a missionary, heart and soul. God had an only Son, and 
 He was a missionary and a physician. A poor, poor imitation I 
 am or wish to be. In this service I hope to live, in it I wish to die." 
 
 Idem. 
 
 " I never made a sacrifice. Of this we ought not to talk when we 
 remember the great sacrifice which He made who left His Father's 
 throne on high to give Himself for us." 
 
 Idem. 
 
CHAPTEE XXI 
 THE ENDLESS END 
 
 LIVINGSTONE'S last month of March came in like 
 a lion and went out with a real one in full blast. 
 " 30th March, Sunday : A Uon," he writes, " roars 
 mightily. The fish-hawk utters his weird voice in the 
 morning as if he lifted up to a friend at a great distance 
 in a sort of falsetto key." Then topsy-turvy Africa tries its 
 old tricks. Crossing a river a canoe capsizes, girl drowned, 
 cartridges spoUed and donkey saddle lost. This means 
 the improvising of a pad with stirrups faked of brass wire 
 fourfold. Then they punt six hours only to gain a tree- 
 less islet ten yards wide, grassy sea on all sides. No sooner 
 do they land than down comes pitiless, pelting rain, their 
 only refuge being to turn over a canoe and seek this catch- 
 as-catch-can sort of shelter. The boys, meanwhile, are 
 tugging at the tent, but the wind blowing great guns tugs 
 harder and swishes it away. The loads, of course, are all 
 soaked, including his poor bedding that began to be wet 
 long ago lying in the bilge of the canoe. 
 
 Not " bed " but bedding is the word, for they tell me 
 Livingstone hadn't one. Every night they snicked ofE 
 four forks of saplings from a tree, made these forks the 
 bearers of two parallel bed-sticks with small bark slats 
 across, then clean sweet grass over all. Each new camp 
 ahead must produce its new supply of saplings for the 
 new job, a new neither-con venient-nor-conventional four- 
 poster each night, the four forks dug deep in the soft soil. 
 This is the self-same style of bed he died on. But, alas, 
 here on a " treeless " ten-yards- wide Ararat, nor wood nor 
 grass is available, so they prick the problem by lining out 
 the loads with a blanket on top. Not standardised boxes, 
 but some higher, some lower to pinch his poor old bones. 
 
 18 273 
 
274 THE ENDLESS END 
 
 Yet these knocked-about boxes did many a smart stroke of 
 policy for him : the men carry them on their shoulders by 
 day, and now the loads carry Livingstone all night into 
 the broken land of slumber. This is rare though ; only 
 to-night the boxes make this stop-gap bed, but every night 
 one of these on-end boxes make his bedside table. The 
 supreme stratagem of this trick-table lies in the fact that 
 being doubly load and table, the former by day carries 
 the contents of the latter by night. 
 
 Now it is more rain wetting everything, but near sunset 
 they spy two Vatwa fishermen paddling quickly off from 
 an ant-hUl where they find a hut, plenty of fish and fire- 
 wood. There they spent the night, watching by turns lest 
 thieves haul away their canoes and goods. They did not 
 touch the fish, not a sprat. Morning brings the beating of 
 a distant drum, so on they go misled by this signal : it 
 is not his land party after ail, but only the amphibious 
 Vatwa. Thus they punt on through papyrus, tall rushes, 
 arums, and grass full of large dark-grey hairy caterpillars. 
 Tired out, nightfall sees them taking refuge once more on a 
 " life-belt '' ant-hiU, a god-send because God sent. A lion 
 roaring, they fire a gun into the stillness of the night, but 
 get no answer save the lion's relentless roar. Livingstone 
 is now pale, bloodless, and weak from bleeding profusely 
 ever since the 31st of March last. " An artery gives off 
 a copious stream and takes away my strength," he writes. 
 " Oh how I long to be permitted by the Over-power to 
 finish my work." 
 
 This means that when Livingstone staggered south 
 bleeding every yard, the few remaining days left to him 
 all tended towards a swoon into insensibility rather than 
 sleep. But instead of spitting out an imprintable word 
 like some modern explorers, he shut his teeth, opened his 
 heart, and wrote on March 25 : " Nothing earthly will make 
 me give up my work in despair. I encourage myself in 
 the Lord my God and go forward." Six days before was 
 his last earthly birthday and this Livingstone, who was a 
 bit glacial and none of your oh-be-joyful saints, wrote, 
 " My Jesus, my king, my life, my all ; I again dedicate my 
 whole self to Thee. Accept me, and grant, Gracious 
 
THE ENDLESS END 275 
 
 Father, that ere this year is gone I may finish my task. 
 In Jesus' name I ask it. Amen, so let it be ! " 
 
 You choke down your regrets when you reflect that, in 
 a double sense, this was Livingstone's last " March " on 
 earth, lunar or sublimar. Born in the month named after 
 the God of War, D. L. was at war all his African life — 
 with No. 1. There is not a taint of censorious criticism in 
 all his Journals, and every morning looking into his four 
 inches of looking-glass, he summed up his whole rule of 
 sanctiflcation by shaking his fist at himself, saying, " Old 
 boy, I'll fight you -to-day ! " There was no need for that 
 alternative " or " when he said, " I will open up a path to 
 the Interior or perish." " And " was his conjunction, 
 not " or " : he did both, and bravely perish he did, but 
 to open it also was his attainment. 
 
 All this pain of his with never a moan. His grim theory 
 was that a man should only moan " when too ill to be 
 sensible of what he was doing. " This explains that Spartan 
 set of the lower maxillary in all his photos. A frankly 
 middle-class face, there is bravery lurking in his Highland 
 bashfulness, and beyond the bravery an optimism born and 
 bred of both. " Bled all night : got up and took lunars " 
 was a typical trick of the undying optimism that saw a 
 chance for his map, when there was little for the man. 
 The same optimism that (with a dexterity bom of practice) 
 could write : " My dysentery is bad but, then, why forget 
 that it wards ofi fever ? " There again you have the old 
 warrior hitching his waggon to a star. 
 
 Not that this were easy to do. Again and again he 
 wrote : "So cloudy and wet that no observations can 
 be taken for latitude or longitude." Or : " Owing to clouds 
 and rain no astronomical observations worth naming during 
 December and January ; impossible to take any." Or 
 again : " Tried lunars in vain. Either sun or moon in 
 clouds." Last of all — sure symbol of the night soon to be 
 swallowed up in the day ! — " Tried hard for a lunar, but 
 the moon was lost in the glare of the sun." That last 
 pathetic winding up of his watch, Susi holding it flat in 
 the palm while Livingstone wound it up, is a queer little 
 picture of what all this roving is about. How could 
 
276 THE ENDLESS END 
 
 the run-down Explorer let this time-piece run down ? 
 No mere watch this, but his chronometer for " sky work," 
 as the natives called it. " All things are double," said the 
 son of Sirach, and every night he held Divine Service there 
 was generally this other sort of subsequent " sky work " ; 
 sextant and chronometer with eyes again heavenward. 
 Two different sorts of " sky work," spiritual and temporal, 
 different in design, but both anchored in the formula 
 that you can only determine your terrestrial location by a 
 celestial position. The first was a matter of shutting his 
 eyes in prayer and looking up : the latter a looking up with 
 eyes very much open. Yet both acts were Divine Service 
 in the sense that you lose your way on earth unless 
 dependent on the celestial vision to tell you where you 
 are, whither tendiag. 
 
 This astronomical work of Livingstone's began long ago 
 when outward bound to Africa : it was Donaldson, a 
 skipper of the old school, who taught him sextant work. 
 Taught him that laconicism about being only able to deter- 
 mine your terrestrial position by a corresponding celestial 
 one. At any rate, let all the world know that Livingstone, 
 far from mere star-gazing, got solid salvation out of his 
 stellar studies. The numeral 4 did it : " Bode's Law," 
 they call it although Kepler and even Titius adumbrated 
 this marvel of the skies, this fearful fidelity of the numeral 
 4. We talk of the " four comers of the heavens," but this 
 other " four " did for Livingstone what the four anchors 
 cast out from the stem did for Paul's water-logged ship. 
 " No God in heaven ? " said D. L. " Then what do you 
 make of this royal, this rhythmic regularity in 4 : Mercury, 
 Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune, 
 aU our planetary system, ruled by this majestic 4 in the 
 same ratio of separation ? " Here you have no frivolous 
 guess work in this law of planetary distances. Opposite 
 each planet's name you coolly write the figure 4. Then, in 
 succession, just as complacently, you go on doubling 
 the numbers 0, 3, 6, 12, 24, 48, 96, etc., to the 4. Always 
 doubling the last numbers to this famous 4. You thus get 
 the good God's planetary distances lined out so methodi- 
 cally, so marvellously, that as James puts it " even the 
 
THE ENDLESS END 277 
 
 devils believe and tremble." Moli^re began it long ago 
 wben he said tbat " two and two make four," but here 
 Livingstone got such a saving dose of stellar " four " that 
 he would have been blind as a bat not to see God in it all. 
 
 Mercury, distance =4:4+ 0= 4 Jupiter, distance = 52:4+ 48= 52 
 
 Venus „ =7:4+ 3=7 Saturn „ =100:4+ 96=100 
 
 Earth „ =10:4+ 6=10 Uranus „ =196:4+192=196 
 
 Mara „ =16:4+12=16 Neptune „ =388:4+384=3881 
 
 Ceres, etc. „ =28 : 4 + 24 =28 
 
 And why not this " fantasia in four " 1 When Kant 
 wrote his Critique of Pure Reason he found that long before 
 he was born aU possible human conceptions had only as 
 many forms as the four corners of the earth : Quantity, 
 Quality, Kelation and Modality. There never were more 
 than these four and never can be world without end. 
 Existence is anchored on these four facts : then why 
 be surprised at this stellar 4 ? 
 
 Thus Livingstone got honey out of the bee that stung 
 him. " This trip," he writes, " has made my hair all 
 grey. If the good Lord gives me favour and permits me 
 to finish my work, I shall thank and bless Him though it 
 has cost me untold toil, pain and travel." His last 
 message to Scotland was, " Fear God and work hard," then 
 off he went to live and die on his own recipe. The harder 
 he worked the more he feared his God, on, right on to the 
 endless end. Allowing for the last ten days of his swooning 
 into insensibility, the 20th April may be fixed as his last 
 day of active service. " A great downpour in the night," 
 he writes, "burst all our now rotten tents to shreds." But 
 off he must go at 6.35 a.m. for another three hours' swaying 
 on the back of his poor old donkey, soon to be killed by a 
 lion. Then came Sunday, day of Christ's victory over 
 death, therefore day of proclaiming His promise of Life. 
 WiU he fail the Saviour who never failed him ? 
 
 Why not use up his available breath in extolling his 
 Lord ? Had Livingstone not boasted that " the end of 
 the geographical feat is the beginning of the Missionary 
 enterprise " ? And now comes Land's End, no more lunars, 
 
 1 At the last moment I am particularly glad to verify these figures from the 
 History of Astronomy, published for the Rationalist Press Association. 
 
278 THE ENDLESS END 
 
 no more map making here out on the edge of the planet 
 Earth where he plunges off into Eternity. His tent, torn 
 last night in the wind and rain, symbolised the rending 
 of that other old Earthly tabernacle. He has only an old 
 stump of pencil, this he sticks into a steel pen-holder, then 
 a bit of bamboo finishes the fake. And among his pre- 
 swoon words you find this : 
 
 20th APRIL: SUNDAY, SERVICE. 
 
 Right to the end, and at the end, far from the abominable 
 blur of cant and humbug. Saint David nailed his own watch- 
 word to the mast of heroic resolve : " The end of the geo- 
 graphical feat is the beginning of the Missionary enter- 
 prise." He was no parson, a layman, an ex-missionary, 
 a Consul, but a Christian " lock, stock and barrel " as 
 Stanley put it. Nor does this 20th of April swan-song 
 lack one single element of subhmity when you discover, 
 as I have done, that it was the CII and CHI Psalms he 
 dwelt on : David the First sending succour to this later 
 David in the sinking African marsh. CII a moan, and CHI 
 a shout of liberation ; the former a frank picture of his 
 body, the latter the First of May arrival of his soul at The 
 Source, 
 
 " I am like a pelican in the wilderness," reads the half- 
 blind Explorer, " I am like an owl of the desert, I watch 
 and am as a sparrow alone on the housetop." 
 
 Then on he goes to the silver lining in this, his last 
 black cloud : " From heaven the Lord did behold the earth, 
 to hear the groaning of the prisoner ; to loose those that 
 are appointed to death." 
 
 Out he goes now from Psalm cii, out into the light and 
 liberty of his last Psalm on earth ciii, " Bless the Lord, my 
 soul : and forget not all His benefits : who healeth aU thy 
 diseases, who redeemeth thy life from destruction . . . 
 so that thy youth is renewed like the eagle." Away back 
 in August of last year when his " relief " arrived from the 
 Coast these were the very volcano-under-the-iceberg words 
 this austere Scot shouted. And now when the real 
 " relief " arrives it is the same over again, " Bless the Lord, 
 my soul, and aU that is within me, bless His holy name. 
 
THE ENDLESS END 279 
 
 Amen." This was Ms last April, next year's April was to 
 see the bells of St. Margaret ringing him in to the Abbey 
 at a quarter to one. 
 
 This 17th of April in both years has contrast yet real 
 resemblance. The literature of the subject reveals that 
 both dates saw them digging for Livingstone, and both the 
 soils were soft sand, sand in The Nave, sand in the desert. 
 The Daily Telegraph of those bygone years contrasts 
 weirdly with the dying man getting water so near the sandy 
 surface. On the same 17th of the same April the same 
 sorts of sand. How eloquent these italics ! 
 
 April 17, 1874 April 17, 1873 
 
 " The grave of Livingstone is in " A tremendous rain burst all our 
 
 the very centre of the nave. . . . Like rotten tenia to shreds . . . the boys 
 
 all graves in the Abbey it is not a deep got water near the surface by digging 
 
 one, the soil is so sandy that it is in yellow sand." 
 scarcely safe to go far down." Last Journals. 
 
 Daily Telegraph, 1874. 
 
 Cicero could write of the " death etiquette " of the gladi- 
 ators : " What gladiator, however mediocre, ever groans ? 
 Who of them ever changes countenance ? which of them 
 when down ready to be dispatched as much as draws back 
 his neck from the stroke ? " And should one of Christ's 
 men wince ? " Christianity is effeminate, you say ? " 
 roared Carlyle, " look at the men it has conquered." 
 
 Besides, said Livingstone, was it not written that " in 
 all things " Jesus Christ should have the pre-eminence ? 
 Then why not Christians first along the African trail on 
 the first of aU errands ? The Authorised Version is wrong 
 in making Paul say to Timothy, " Endure hardship as a 
 good soldier of Jesus Christ " : the middle voice means 
 " Take your share of hardship," a proof this, that we should 
 all go in for it, and not professional parsons merely. 
 " Cheer up ! the worst has yet to come ! " was the old first- 
 century call from brother to brother because they were all 
 in for it and not a select few. 
 
 Mere Lambeth loquacity about unity pales into insigni- 
 ficance before this real thing, unity in suffering. Look what 
 the austerely accurate Lecky said of it all and mark the 
 royal result of this community of suffering, " There has 
 probably never existed v/pon earth a community whose 
 
280 THE ENDLESS END 
 
 members were boimd to one another by a deeper or purer 
 afEection than the Christians in the days of the persecu- 
 tions." 
 
 Even John Wesley, a keen ecclesiastic who elaborated 
 an intricate system of checks and counter-checks, what 
 did he say in his old age ? " 1 am sick of opinions. I am 
 weary to bear them ; my soul loathes the frothy food. 
 Give me solid, substantial religion ; give me a humble, 
 gentle lover of God and man, a man full of mercy and good 
 faith, a man laying himself out in the work of faith, the 
 patience of hope, the labour of love. Let my soul be with 
 those Christians wheresoever they be and whatsoever 
 opinions they are of." And such was Livingstone. 
 
 On setting out from Ujiji had he not prayed " the good 
 Lord of all to help me to show myself one of His stout- 
 hearted servants, an honour to my children, and perhaps 
 to my country and race " ? Here at the end of all things, 
 God is seen to have answered in power that starting- out 
 prayer. Right on to the end, his dying dream was of 
 those four fountains gushing north to form the wondrous 
 Nile of Herodotus and Ptolemy. The very fact that they 
 were four fountains, four only, set him off on the old Garden 
 of Eden analogy of four such fountains flowing forth. The 
 analogy is his own, remember ; these two sets of four 
 seemed to clamour for affinity in his brain, even although 
 the Geography of it all mocked it as mirage. " Oh if this 
 Lubaland were only Armenia," said he, " then these four 
 fountains I am following up would lead me to the real 
 old Eden of Genesis." Yes ; good indeed, it was, this 
 nearly dead-and-gone Livingstone has such an Eden-anchor 
 to windward all the time. For, mark you, it is scientific 
 failure we are here contemplating : these four Nile springs 
 were away north where Speke had found them long ago, 
 and this splashing through Bangweulu marshes is a phan- 
 tom chase. The four fountains of Eden will soon be reached, 
 real Eden, real fountains, real Paradise at last. The 
 four converge into one, " a pure river of water of life clear 
 as crystal proceeding out of the Throne of God and of the 
 Lamb." This was his dream, this the reality ; " a river 
 went out of Eden to water the garden ; and from thence 
 
Xv^^ ^X^ oJ ^^-^ 
 
 AUTOGRAPH FACSIMILE OF LAST ENTRY 
 
 Reproduced by land permission of Mr. John Murray. 
 Between 280 and 281] 
 

 
 t^ >fc^''~0-t_JUj«> M^ ^^^vtv 
 
 
 
 IN LIVINGSTONES NOTE BOOK. 
 
THE ENDLESS END 281 
 
 it was parted, and became four heads, Pison, Gihon, 
 Hiddekel, and Euphrates." 
 
 Standing by that dear, dead body behold ! one more of 
 life's little ironies. Mabruki is there, Speke's ugly deformed 
 " bull-headed " boy wearing his medal for assisting in the 
 " Discovery of the Nile Sources." Every day that medal 
 had caught Livingstone's glance to challenge his contrary 
 certitude. The cock-sure engraving on that medal put in 
 the past tense a discovery claimed by the Doctor as yet 
 future. It was a metallic taunt and none the less exas- 
 perating because worn by one of his own men, on Ms own 
 expedition to " discover" what had been already discovered. 
 Raging far away in London clubs as a war of words and 
 sectarian stupidity, here you have " the Nile problem " 
 pushing its propaganda right into Livingstone's caravan 
 and taunting even his dead body. 
 
 Also on that same spot at that same time stands another 
 type. He is Jacob Wainwright ; he is the model of all 
 Mission " boys " ; he takes the prayer book from his 
 master's dead hand and carries on when Livingstone passes. 
 The whites only come to go, but the abiding black fills 
 the gap, the local man for the local job. At the call of 
 England he it was who crossed the ocean to see Livingstone's 
 " second end " in The Abbey and heard his own old biirial 
 service repeated 
 
 " With pomp and rolling music, like a King." 
 
 The records of that day remark dryly that this African 
 onlooker — " a simple-looking quiet honest lad as he stands 
 by the grave takes his wonder stolidly." But the fact 
 is it is the contrast of it all that is stupefying his black 
 brain, the pall versus their old covering of leaves to keep 
 the birds away ; the polished oaken coflSn shaming their 
 bark cortex stripped from a tree ; the inscription on the 
 plate outclassing his simple lettering dug into the tree. 
 The very crudeness of all this contrast should make us 
 beware of expecting high-flown English ecclesiastical 
 formulae among simple Central African folks. The Abbey 
 is a far cry to The Upper Room both as to time and taste : 
 beginnings in Antioch or Africa are humble both in manner 
 
282 THE ENDLESS END 
 
 and measure. Let us be exceedingly merciful with these 
 young African chLurches and their young Christians. 
 
 It was reserved for a namesake of Livingstone to put 
 all this nobly thus : " One praises the heroism of the 
 missionaries, but what of the heroism of a native, with 
 his inherited instincts, living in a village saturated with 
 lies and uncleanness, often the only Christian in a com- 
 munity given over to sin, and yet a faithful disciple of 
 Christ 1 There are some, formerly witch-doctors, head- 
 hunters, beer-drunkards and worse, who have risen to 
 heights which white persons, with all their advantages, 
 coidd hardly surpass. How terrible the back-pull of habit 
 and temptation is no European can realise. There is no 
 greater nonsense written than by some white travellers 
 who essay to describe mission work from isolated examples 
 of this or that ' boy ' : it indicates lack of imagination, of 
 inability to put oneself in the place of another less favour- 
 ably situated. Think of the passions which have been 
 surging unchecked throughout the centuries, suddenly 
 arrested by the stern command, ' Thou shalt not.' It 
 is not a wonder that the old nature, penned up, and 
 restrained by a moral faculty only some years old, should 
 occasionally break out : the marvel is that so many succeed 
 in resisting it." ' 
 
 This Livingstone of ours died in the hope of resurrection 
 and here is a coincidence. Getting at these people means 
 that sometimes you stalk straight into an intellectual 
 surprise. Like one who having gone forth lightly to shoot 
 rabbits suddenly comes on a Hon, here in one of their 
 " down at the heels " little towns you meet a mild-mannered 
 man who does a bit of the devil's deputation work on you. 
 His manner, too, all the more deadly with each word 
 wrapped up in a smile to redeem it from impertinence. As 
 a sure mark that the devil in person is pushing the pro- 
 paganda this meek mentor makes straight for the Resur- 
 rection and tries to cover himself with glory and you with 
 shame. Mark you, this native is none of your vapouring 
 and purblind mortals so I must meet him with Paul's 
 cheery " Why should it be thought a thing incredible with 
 
 ^ Laws of Livingstonia, p. 378. 
 
THE ENDLESS END 283 
 
 you that God should raise the dead ? " Then came the 
 sight, refreshing sight, of my youngsters rallying to the 
 resurrection and pinning their sceptic down to this Pauline 
 challenge : Why, oh why ? 
 
 My old school friend Shakespeare made a jingle out of 
 " but me no buts," and here you have them malong merry 
 out of this '' why me no whys." I mean, of course, their 
 why-should-it-be-thought-incredible defence of such a 
 divine deed. They have made of it a runic rhyme with 
 three " whys " beginning as many lines, but it defies true 
 translation. I am ashamed to ofier such a poor pretence 
 at rendering the deathless defiance of the last " why," as 
 it laughs its logical assurance concerning the " dust- 
 destiny " of our race : from it we came, back to it we go, 
 and out from it we come again. 
 
 \st Why : Oh ! if from the ground we first of all came ? 
 2nd Why : Oh ! if hack to it in death we return again ? 
 Zrd Why : Oh ! then haw can it he ahsurd to rise from it again ? 
 
 These simple folk lying on the lap of Mother Earth beat 
 us town-bred elegants in their gush of certainty : you 
 cannot get out of a difficulty with them under the fog of 
 a definition. This explains this glorious jingle ; they get 
 out of it that which sends the laugh back on Sir Oracle : 
 to them the incredible thing is that the same earth from 
 which we were first formed could conceivably find it difficult 
 to repeat the same result in resurrection. Better than 
 mere dialectical skill, than mere torrential flow of speech 
 is the lofty obstinacy in that loyal laugh of theirs as, again 
 and again, they chuckle it out with content, " Where is 
 the absurdity of coming out again from the very earth 
 from which we came first of aU ? " 
 
 So there you leave Mr. Sceptic with his mouth shut for 
 him, sitting as silent as a sack of flour. (To anyone with 
 an ear for African phonetics, the triple rattle on the 
 terminal uses of cMni in Swahili make this quite good 
 hearing : 
 
 " Tv, me tolca chini I 
 Tu ta rudi chini ! 
 Tu ta toka tena chini /") 
 
 Gordon said of the men who murdered him : " I like 
 
284 THE ENDLESS END 
 
 the Arab ; he is not ashamed of his God." I, too, am glad 
 that all these millions of Islam believe very stoutly in 
 a resurrection of the dead. But just as their " pray " 
 is better spelt with an " e," so this " praying " distorted 
 into " preying " suggests another denial of this doctrine 
 of theirs, I mean the sinister implications of the fact that 
 these slavers carry an old tootling bugle boasting the theo- 
 logical title Baraghumu. Now this is the very word they 
 use for the last trump at the Resurrection, the local blast 
 of the slave raiders being one of murder and rapine when 
 the victims are killed, whereas the same word Baraghumu 
 tells of the last-day raising of those very dead. Yet they 
 do not see the clash of inconsistency in it all : the same 
 word warning them that they wiU answer for it all at the bar 
 of God. These Arabs blow their own trumpets very well, 
 but when the last trump sounds it will be another story. 
 
 Where LiAongstone died there also die the Ilala indigens. 
 Here you have a death in a small round hut, their usual 
 one-door circular construction. Why not, then, remove 
 the body for burial through the same old doorway en route 
 the graveyard ? Why break irregularly through the wall 
 ignoring the one and only doorway ? One does not need 
 to be immeshed and drowned in metaphysics to find the 
 reason why. The answer is that this new exit cut out 
 rudely with axes is to recognise the fact that the human 
 spirit has left for ever the old beaten track. No longer 
 will the ten toes pad in and out through the old orthodox 
 door, hence this newly cut exit for the new journey beyond 
 the grave. It is more than dramatic to see these rival 
 exits in one tiny hut, the regular rectangle and this new one 
 wrenched open, a clumsy any-shape-at-all aperture for the 
 dead body to make its last exit. Picture a death in Park 
 Lane : add the additional phase of the conventional cortege 
 gathering at the door, then spring the surprise of a gang of 
 masons spurning the regular doorway, and breaking a hole 
 in the masonry through which the coffin is passed, dis- 
 daining the old doorway. The old doorway was for the old 
 methodic movements of a man in the flesh : here the spirit 
 having flown, they symbolise its flight with this new exit. 
 
 I must repeat it. Dominating one's regret is astonish- 
 
THE ENDLESS END 285 
 
 ment that (not at all in his best manner) Sir H. H. Johnston 
 should have tampered with Livingstone's supreme consola- 
 tion in Life — prayer, prayer and more prayer. It began 
 long ago when Sir Harry had a dig at Livingstone's initial 
 failure ia examination as a Missionary, which he puts down 
 to " utter failure as a preacher, hesitating manner and lack 
 of fluency in extempore prayer." (Poor extempore 
 prayer : whenever did a dying man pray any other sort 
 of supplication ?) Then comes his second fling at this 
 pathetic praying of his. Livingstone has now passed his 
 exam, and the Devil runs away with Sir Harry's pen in 
 the dirty explanation that he passed because he had become 
 " sufficiently conversant with the glib phraseology of 
 commonplace prayer to scrape through his examination." 
 Finally, and in no way mitigating one's displeasure, comes 
 this last sacrilege in robbing us of our boyhood belief that 
 Livingstone did die in the act and fact of prayer. 
 
 For look at these four points that fix the act as a fact. 
 (1) You have his boy Majwara sleeping in the old attitude 
 across the doorway ready for the faintest call. (2) Here 
 you have an everlasting spectator to the most private 
 phase of his master's movements, the more so as these boys 
 pad in and out silently. (3) Why, then, was Livingstone 
 cold dead when they discovered his decease, why if not 
 that Majwara, seeing his Bwana at the old devotions in the 
 old attitude long known to him, had slipped off to sleep, 
 the awakening still finding Livingstone " kneeling by the 
 side of his bed, his body stretched forward, his head buried 
 upon the piUow." (4) Mark you, the men who tell all 
 this were intimate with his every movement, knew when 
 and how he prayed, knew the attitude so well that even 
 when all was over, long over, they even temporised about 
 touching the dead body. " They watched him : he did not 
 stir, there was no sign of breathing ; then one of them, 
 Matthew, advanced softly to him and placed his hands to 
 his cheeks. It was sufficient ; life had been extinct some 
 time, and the body almost cold : Livingstone was dead." 
 
 On that double-daybreak of the 1st of May, the turtle- 
 doves and cocks give their customary call of the dawn. 
 But there is one bird, sure sentinel of Livingstone's very 
 
286 THE ENDLESS END 
 
 soul, the fishing eagle, plumage of rich chocolate brown and 
 snowy white. It haunted him to the end. That metallic 
 cry kept clanging him into eternity. He had found it on 
 all the great waters of Africa, Zambezi, Nyasa, Tanganyika, 
 Mweru, Bangweulu, and to him there was always this mes- 
 sage from the other world. Both kept to the water, riverine 
 man and his riverine bird. Let but Haliaetus vocifer call, 
 and then and there is water for any then-and-there man. 
 The old companions are parting at last. The dying-by- 
 degrees Livingstone wrote near the end : " With the south- 
 east aerial current comes heat and sultriness. A blanket is 
 scarcely needed till the early hours of the morning, and here, 
 after the turtledoves and cocks give out their warning calls 
 to the watchful, the fish-eagle lifts up his remarkable voice. 
 It is pitched in a high falsetto key, very loud, and seems 
 as if he were calling to someone in the other world. Once 
 heard, his weird, unearthly voice can never be forgotten — 
 it sticks to one through life." We awoke at cock-crow 
 and recalled that other cock-crow just after Livingstone 
 had gone to God. All across Africa this shrill clarion is 
 the negro's only clock, only chime to tell him bwa cha, 
 " night has gone." Black of pigment, they have such affin- 
 ity with the night that these IlS.la natives never speak of 
 the day as breaking : hwa cha means, " night has gone," 
 the day in due course being implied. This black penchant 
 is proved by the foolish way they refuse to say, " two or 
 three days," it is always nshiku shitatu, " three nights," 
 a month being thirty nights ! Thus the Dark Continent 
 has this clannish " dark " calendar. 
 
 But there is more in this : true to the topsy-turvy 
 character of this continent, the curiosity of the local African 
 calendar is that their word for "day" is "night" 
 {lushihu), and this you soon find when your herd boy comes 
 in the morning to report a leopard as having raided the 
 goat-kraal with, " To-night a leopard came," etc. : not, 
 " last night," mark you. In other words, we are away 
 back at the beginning of all things where it is written " The 
 evening and the morning were the first day," Africa 
 once again scoring off exalted Europe. Well done, Africa : 
 what is the good of being black if you do not give this black 
 
THE ENDLESS END 287 
 
 of yours a prior position, a black niglit before tlie bright 
 morning. It shows he has a good opinion of himself. 
 What if even such an unlikely verse as " Until the day 
 break " should mean the absurd opposite ? Few Bible 
 texts have obtained a wider currency than this from the 
 Authorised Version of the Song of Songs, occurring, as it 
 does, in the only passage (ii. 10-17) which finds a place, as 
 an Easter lesson, in the lectionary of the Church of England. 
 It has been inscribed upon countless memorials of the dead, 
 and it expresses surely with fresh force in these dark, 
 distressful days the yearnings of many hearts after the 
 eternal morning — yet it is all wrong. 
 
 There is more than a literary interest in noting that, 
 rightly translated (as it is in the Revised Version) and in 
 its original setting, it is a description, not of the morning, 
 but, au contraire, of the evening. The Shulamite maiden 
 tells how on some spring morning she has heard the voice 
 of her shepherd lover calling to her, " Rise up, my love, 
 my fair one, and come away. . . ." But the delightful 
 tryst must be delayed, for she hears, too, the severe 
 summons of her " mother's sons " to stop that sentiment- 
 alism of hers and work in the vineyards of which they have 
 made her the keeper (i. 6) : " Take us the foxes, the little 
 foxes, that spoil the grapes. , . ." So, with a sigh, she 
 replies to her lover that he must return over the mountains 
 across which he had come leaping and skipping, the moim- 
 tains of Bether, " of separation," " till the day is cool 
 and the shadows flee away " — ^i.e. stretched out as the sun 
 goes down. Remember in all this I have followed the 
 commentators, who remind us of the parallel Hebrew 
 word in Gen. iii. 17, " in the cool of the day," and again 
 of Pss. cii. 12, cix. 23, " the shadow that declineth," or 
 " is elongated." Does the correct version really lose 
 anything in literary or even in spiritual beauty ? May not 
 the evening, in more senses than one, bring a foretaste 
 of the full and final "joy that cometh in the morning " 
 of eternity ? The first chapter of Genesis puts night 
 before day, and the " evening and the morning " were 
 " one day." 
 
 Here at Livingstone's grave there is much subdued tongue- 
 
288 THE ENDLESS END 
 
 wagging : the " death-puzzle " {akafunda ka mfwa) is their 
 great theme. This word " puzzle " is only their noun 
 " knot " masquerading in metaphor ; the knot that never 
 was unravelled ; the death-knot that defies man to imtie 
 it. Better : it is the real Gordian knot for the sword only- 
 can cut it, hence their phrase, " the dead know all things." 
 They kill, kill, kill, and are never tired of killing, yet the idea 
 of death in their language proves they are sinning against 
 a blaze of light. Sitting at translation work with the chief 
 squatted ten yards ofi, I fished across for an idiom expres- 
 sive of Christ's dying a fool's death. " Died like a sheep," 
 said he laconically. This gives an opening, and, hot on 
 the scent of discovery, I sit greedily pencilling the chief's 
 royal dicta as to his tribe's idea of death. For a few 
 minutes I had to fight my way through the fog of a new 
 set of secret words used by the priests, but after this initial 
 adjustment, I wrote on and on, driven to the imf altering 
 conviction that here was a whole majestic doctrine of death, 
 simple yet sublime, African murderers, too, the custodians 
 of such a sacred creed of mortality. Who can deny that, 
 having so sinned against light, they will answer for it to 
 the bar of God ? 
 
 The first of the tribal titles for death is " The Secret " 
 with its twin idea " The Puzzle." This the chief used when 
 he looked me all over as type of the unknown European 
 race, looked at boots, looked at cut of coat (cut coat, call 
 it), looked at gun and all the other et ceteras : " Marvel of a 
 tribe," said he, " is the white tribe : but one thing they 
 lack, the solving of the death-puzzle ! " The next death- 
 title is called " The Arrival " because the Unknown is now 
 The Known, and akin to this is death as " The Perfect 
 Education " ; don't the dead know all things ? Yes, on 
 Death's head are many crowns : the next tribal title is 
 " The Wages " and this means that the familiar verse reads 
 " The Wages of Sin is The Wages, i.e. death." So, on 
 and on these titles run : The Stripper, The Chastiser, The 
 Revealer, The Joiner, etc., all technical terms for death 
 in the land where blood flows like water.' 
 
 ^ Constellating round this death-prefix FV you have fula, end ; fuka, 
 corrupt ; futa, pay ; funa, threaten ; fuma, depart ; funda, teach, etc., the 
 initial fu unifying the whole cycle of thought. 
 
THE ENDLESS END 289 
 
 Yet the light of immortality is flaring lugk in aU this 
 darkness. No doubt in Africa 2,000 years of slavery have 
 done their work well, yet I repeat never in its darkest 
 night did Africa deny the instinct of immortahty. With 
 the weU-known perversity with which expectations are 
 falsified, here is the African prisoner at the bar giving 
 evidence against himself. This is the kind of thing : 
 He has killed a man, but this is no mere dead-and-done-with 
 proposition, for all across the land and moaning through 
 the marshes is the hauntiag belief that " the dead do not 
 really die." Hence their great system of Spirit-worship 
 unifying the land and life of the African. Then with what 
 a quenchless delight does he insist that the " body is the 
 cottage of the soul " 'i The house made of earth, thebody made 
 of earth, and back they both go to the earth from which 
 they came. What is his picture of human language if not 
 that of an imprisoned prince (the soul) peepiug out through 
 the loopholes of the senses, seeing pictures passing, and these 
 pictures he vocalises in speech ? Or take the case of my 
 old friend Kalala who died the other day : notifying me 
 of his death comes an ancient dame, bleared of eye, an 
 African of the Africans. With not one tiny seed of senti- 
 ment in her composition how does she report on the 
 supreme deprivation of life, called death ? Mumbling her 
 old gums she says soliloquisingly, " Yes, Kalala has left 
 the suburbs and gone into the city." Again watch how 
 to them Eternity looms larger than time in this fateful, 
 final thing called death. We perpetrate the platitude that 
 the defunct has " departed," a poor enough sophism, for 
 if we only waited long enough death would declare that 
 departure-phase deplorably enough. The African with 
 a charming imperiousness which is irresistible says not 
 " he has departed," but " he has arrived ! " a much more 
 gloriously graphic thing. 
 
 Livingstone has been dead his half a century, but what 
 do they say of Jiim ? Staggering down to this Ilala grave, 
 he finally died under this fruit tree on the edge of the great 
 marshes : dead ? They say of him, Wa Laala, " he sleep- 
 eth." And if all Europe with the sophisticated indifference 
 of materialism insisted that Saint David was as dead as 
 19 
 
290 THE ENDLESS END 
 
 Queen Aime and not sleeping a wink, then all Africa would 
 arise and retort royally, " Dying he died, but sleeping he 
 sleepeth." What is more, this much-scared and scanda- 
 lised negro would tell you that the same death they call 
 " the sleeping " is also named " the awakening." This 
 also explains why his very common word for " to teach " 
 (Fundishia) is from the root " to die " ; for do they not 
 say that death is " the perfect education " because the 
 dead know all things ? This is why the dead are all buried 
 with their eyes looking east : is not their sun rising and is 
 not death day-break ? And so on and so on. Despise 
 them if you dare for their conical occiput and receding 
 chin ; call them " child nations " if you condescendingly 
 care to, when you contrast their stunted ethical growth 
 with that of the spoiled and petted children of a pampered 
 civilisation. Yet do not for a single moment of time deny 
 that God has hereby made good His word that out of the 
 mouths of these anthropological " babes and sucklings " 
 He has perfected praise of immortality. 
 
 Neither inductive nor inferential, you have all this and 
 much more than this flaming like a fire in the darkest den 
 of Africa : not a dry, discussable doctrine, but an imperious 
 instinct of Immortality. As a duck takes to the water 
 and an eagle to the sty, so surely do they swim and soar 
 instinctively in this idea of Infinity. And if analysis be 
 the death of sentiment, then to dare to argue this would be 
 to desecrate the deep design of God. He who never fails 
 the birds will not ever fail man. It is as sure, aye, surer 
 far than the bee when it elaborates instinctively the cell 
 for the future honey. Surer than the bird of passage never 
 deceived in its migrations ; than the instinct of the butter- 
 fly and the beetle when they prepare the cradle and the food 
 for the offspring they will never see. The thirst for the 
 Infinite proves the Infinite. 
 
BOOK IV 
 
 CHAPTEK XXII 
 A SURPRISE FROM THE SOUTH 
 
 These lines tell of the surprise sprung 
 on us when they from the South met us 
 from the North. A reminder of the 
 Coming Day when God Most High will 
 say " to the North, ' Give up ' / and 
 to the South, ' Keep not hack ; bring 
 my sons from afar.' " 
 
" ' ^ strange coincidence,' to use a phrase 
 By which such things are settled nowadays." 
 
 Byron. 
 
 ^' No quest, no conquest." 
 
 " Jesus Christ is too effeminate, you say ? Think of the men 
 He has mastered." 
 
 Carlyle. 
 
 " What can ennoble sots or slaves or cowards ? 
 Alas, not all the blood of all the Howards." 
 
CHAPTEE XXII 
 A SURPRISE FROM THE SOUTH 
 
 LIVINGSTONE, you recall, rather dreaded being 
 forestalled by some second party advancing from 
 the west. His pleasurable surprise surrendered 
 to dismay when at Kazembe's the news reached him of some 
 roving Portuguese having " cut him out " in Katanga. 
 And so, s'il vous flaU, with ourselves. Picture Peary 
 reaching The Pole to find someone simultaneously climbing 
 up to it from the opposite side, from the Asiatic, I mean, as 
 he from the American side. Yet it is neither exaggera- 
 tion nor extenuation to say that this is what is now happen- 
 ing in our case. We, coming out of the interior, are all 
 Tinconscious of the approach of explorers from the spick- 
 and-span South. What spoils matters, too, is that 
 Chikwanda has been raiding and burning villages all 
 aroTind us, guns are banging across the plains. The clouds 
 of it we see are not the honest, hospitable smoke of hamlets, 
 but King Cain out on the war-path. 
 
 Here, then, at the world's end is the last time, last place, 
 to expect visitors. Yet my wife on ahead is nearly shot 
 dead. Nearly killed by a dazed white man who has taken 
 cover and (with all this fighting around us) coolly takes aim 
 at this unknown " something " stirring in the grass. Can 
 this be Chikwanda outflanking them ? Will this dead shot 
 shoot her dead ? In a bound of trepidation it all comes out 
 as the lady emerges, smiling instead of shot. With a 
 most raffish appearance, here is an English gentleman pro- 
 fusely apologising for his benevolent intent to put a bullet 
 in her. How coiJd he even or ever dream of a white woman 
 coming out of the unknown interior ? It is Frank Smithe- 
 man, great African Scout and fiirst man to enter Mafeking. 
 They are exploring, groping their way up. Have heard of 
 
 293 
 
294 A SURPRISE FROM THE SOUTH 
 
 Giraud's plundered boat. Have hoped to get far enough 
 north to take it by " force, finance or finesse." And lo ! 
 we have forestalled them from the north and got the boat 
 for nothing. 
 
 They are just out fresh from London. Their hounds 
 are drunk with the scent of so much game criss-crossing 
 the trail. They have fever these great dogs, get quinine 
 like their masters, and are canine exiles from England. 
 Poor pampered beasts ! when they spied my wife's skirt 
 rustling out of the grass they made a bound of loyalty 
 for her. And clannishly stuck to those symbolic skirts, 
 thinking, yes, thinking furiously all the while that just 
 round a bend in the forest somehow, somewhere, somewhen 
 their old United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland 
 would break into full view. Poor old dogs, they soon 
 snuffed out like flies. 
 
 And so the South meets the North, here where Livingstone 
 died. Then came the great Memorial Service around The 
 Tree. There were the flashing camp fixes, the distant 
 skyline red with burning villages, the dull boom of a gun 
 speaking across the plains. Then the little organ piping 
 out " Abide with me," followed by " Only remembered 
 by what we have done." Chitambo was there as Chairman- 
 Chief and I read the 11th chapter of Hebrews, the " West- 
 minster Abbey of the Bible." Livingstone too was there, 
 as saith that same " Hebrews " : " encompassed about 
 with so great a cloud of witnesses . . . the spirits of just, 
 men made perfect." 
 
 Charles Reade in Hard Cash is less hard on Livingstone's 
 Evangelicals than on hard cash. Writing of Jane's death, 
 and how a timid girl who would scream at a scratch could 
 meet the King of Terrors with smiles and triumph, he says 
 of her evangelical death : " Thus died the member of a 
 religious party whose diction now and then offends one 
 to the soul. But the root of the matter is in them. Allow- 
 ance made for those passions, foibles, and infirmities of 
 the flesh even you and I are not entirely free from, they 
 live fearing God and die loving Him." 
 
 And so Livingstone : all through his Last Journals he 
 is never ashamed of his Gospel : f&r contra he pushes it 
 
A SURPRISE FROM THE SOUTH 295 
 
 as the panacea for all Africa's ills. What more sensible, 
 what more satisfying proposition can you present than this : 
 " The prayer to Jesus," he writes, " for a new heart and 
 right spirit at once commends itself as appropriate." 
 
 Then he rubs it in : "I have heard people say that Chris- 
 tianity made the blacks worse, but did not agree with them. 
 I can stand a good deal of bosh, but to tell me that 
 Christianity makes people worse — ^ugh ! tell that to the 
 young trouts." 
 
 Then he tackles, not young trouts, but young men, all 
 young men, and sums it up to Tom, his son Tom : " I 
 have nothing better to say to you than to take God as your 
 Father, Jesus for your Saviour, and the Holy Ghost for 
 your Sanctifier. Do this and you are safe for ever — ^no 
 evil can then befaU you." 
 
 I told those good fellows the Prospectors that the last 
 time his honest old father gave him the rod was when David 
 revolted against reading Wilberforce's Practical Christian- 
 ity. In a sleepy voice not innocent of irritation he said 
 No ! to Wilberforce and Yes ! to this unwise whacking. 
 " Practical Christianity ? " Why not practise this capital 
 without reading about it ? His botany, geology and 
 Ruddiman's Latin, were all these outside the pale of 
 " Practical Christianity " ? Poor old adjective " practi- 
 cal," what drastically different values have been put upon 
 thee ! Nevertheless that rod of the righteous resulted in 
 a not-too-late vote of thanks for Messrs. Wilberforce and 
 Livingstone Senior. Unlike the modem Master Cocksure, 
 this revolt against any such " salvation " topics is tracked 
 down by David himself to its lair in David's own heart : 
 Livingstone Junior refused to stroke down his soul with 
 snug complacency a la Sir Harry Johnston. He discovers 
 as he is getting on to his twelfth year that his early " con- 
 victions were effaced " and his " religious feelings blunted." 
 How, then, can he work out a salvation not yet worked 
 in ? True for you, Mr. Wilberforce, how go in for a 
 " Practical Christianity " if you are not first of all 'a 
 Christian ? " 
 
 Then came the crisis of his life : " the theory of a free 
 salvation," says he, " by the atonement of our Saviour 
 
296 A SURPRISE FROM THE SOUTH 
 
 I tad no diflficulty in understanding, but it was only about 
 this time that I began to feel the necessity and value of 
 a personal application of the provisions of that atonement 
 to my own case." To use his own words again : " I saw 
 the duty and inestimable privilege immediately to accept 
 salvation by Christ. Humbly believing that through sove- 
 reign mercy and grace I have been enabled so to do, and 
 having felt, in some measure, its effects on my still depraved 
 and deceitful heart, it is my desire to show my attachment 
 to the cause of Him who died for me by devoting my life 
 to His service." Not dry old dogma, not a bit. There is 
 the sap and spice of salvation when he breaks away thus : 
 " What is the atonement of Christ ? It is Himself : it 
 is the inherent and everlasting mercy of God made apparent 
 to human eyes and ears. The everlasting love was dis- 
 closed by OUT Lord's life and death. It showed that God 
 forgives, because He loves to forgive. He works by smiles 
 if possible, if not by frowns ; pain, is only a means of en- 
 forcing love. If we speak of strength, lo, He is strong. 
 The Almighty ; The Overpower ; the Mind of the Universe. 
 The heart thriUs at the idea of His greatness." 
 
 Pace Sir Harry, one does not need to be immeshed and 
 drowned in metaphysics to see in Livingstone's " con- 
 version " the formative factor in his character. Stanley 
 was last with him, saw him at the closest of aU quarters — 
 African travel, blistered feet, and vertical rays. The great 
 analysts would have revelled in this chance Stanley had 
 to find out just what had tamed this tiger. And here is 
 what it all ends in : " The wan features," says Stanley, 
 " which had shocked me at first meeting, the heavy step 
 which told of age and hard travel, the grey beard and bowed 
 shoulders, belied the man. Underneath that well-worn ex- 
 terior lay an endless fund of high spirits and inexhaustible 
 humour ; that rugged frame of his enclosed a young and 
 most exuberant soul. In him, religion exhibits its loveliest 
 features ; it governs his conduct not only towards his 
 servants, but towards the natives, the bigoted Mohamme- 
 dans, and all who come in contact with him. Without it, 
 Livingstone, with his ardent temperament, his enthusiasm, 
 his high spirit and courage, must have become imcom- 
 
A SURPRISE FROM THE SOUTH 297 
 
 panionable, and a hard master. Religion has tamed him, 
 and made him a Christian gentleman : the crude and wilful 
 have been refined and subdued ; religion has made him 
 the most companionable of men and indulgent of masters — 
 a man whose society is pleasurable." 
 
 The late Dr. Alexander Whyte probably held the key 
 to Livingstone's theology when he made that most merciless 
 attack upon Nature's darling, the rich young ruler. Him 
 he hated in the name of the Lord. We are indebted to Dr. 
 Kelman for telling us how he described in most amazing 
 terms his immaculate babyhood, boyhood, and youth, 
 then ran him along his goody-goody career until at last 
 he died, watched htm (and made his congregation see him) 
 wheeling blindly down the black depths of the inferno 
 circle after circle, until he disappeared on his way down its 
 bottomless abyss. Then he, who had been bending over 
 the pulpit, watching him with blazing eyes, shouted, "I 
 hear it. It's the mocking laughter of the universe, and it's 
 shouting at him over the edge, ' Ha ! ha ! Kept the com- 
 mandments ! ' " 
 
 That is exactly where Livingstone stood : " do-your- 
 bestism " gave him no spiritual status with God. Kelman 
 goes on to elucidate this Livingstone bent of mind when 
 Whyte scourged the good easy men and women of his time 
 and the fashionable fife of his land. Some who preferred 
 smoother words blamed him for this, and did not know the 
 power and the bite of it upon those more sorely tempted. 
 He was preaching once upon " If I make my bed in hell," 
 and the gist of the sermon was that of course if you make 
 your bed in hell you will have to lie upon it. Walking 
 homeward from the Assembly Hall in which the address 
 had been given, along the dark wintry streets of Edinburgh, 
 just as he was passing the end of one of those streets that 
 enter Prince's Street from the north, a cloaked figure 
 sprang out upon him and seized his arm. A voice whispered 
 hoarsely, " I've made my bed in hell," and the man 
 vanished into the night. 
 
 You may roundly condemn all this as " too preachy," 
 but what else can you expect at Livingstone's first (and last) 
 funeral sermon under The Tree, his own Tree, soon to be so 
 
298 A SURPRISE FROM THE SOUTH 
 
 tragically destroyed ? How could we know that there 
 never would be another opportunity to so encircle that noble 
 " Mupundu " ? Livingstone's " Dew-drier " name, Mu- 
 kuntalume began it all. And by a strange concurrence of 
 circumstances here, if you please, is our " text for the 
 day " finding its explanation in this very " dew-drier " 
 name of his, in this very grass of his, soaking us in two 
 ticks. Blame Livingstone for this sermonette ; unlikely 
 text with unlikely solution, what has this damp morning 
 grass to do with such a verse in " Hebrews " as, " It is 
 evident our Lord (and Livingstone likewise !) came of 
 Judah " ? How can we hope to explain this " It is evi- 
 dent " unless by something very evident indeed ? The 
 authentic African answer is (it may not be amiss to suggest) 
 that probably specialists have rather persistently missed 
 the point why " it is evident " our Lord came of princely 
 Judah. For Judah, pioneer Judah, like Livingstone, 
 led the desert trail, and the reference is surely to the same 
 writer's preceding " wet- grass " declaration where Christ 
 is the " Captain " (or File Leader = Dew Drier) of our 
 salvation." This was Judah's " path-boring " business : 
 they officially led the way each morning into the unknown 
 and got first blow or first blessing as the day's lot might be. 
 
 Here in the long grass, following in Livingstone's wake, 
 we too get off betimes to escape the sun and soon learn, 
 after two minutes of soaking, that the African equivalent 
 for " File Leader " is the title, too-truthful title, " Dew 
 Drier." Therefore, this gives the " Hebrews " picture its 
 original African value ; a narrow trail sinuous with hidden 
 surprises ahead, the clotted overhanging grass brushing 
 against the dew drier with hidden ambush lurking to kiU. 
 Such was princely Judah and such, much more such, was 
 He, Lion of the Tribe of Judah, Dew Drier of our salvation, 
 who comes knocking to the soul with the uncontested 
 claim, " Open to Me . . . for my head is filled with dew 
 and my locks with the drops of the night." He got wet 
 that we might go dry. His the first sting of the blast, and 
 ours the sheltering behind Him as we foUow in His steps. 
 
 Surely, then, " it is evident " the Lord of David Living- 
 stone came of princely path-boring Judah, for He dried ofi 
 
A SURPRISE FROM THE SOUTH 299 
 
 more dew for those following than Judah ever did. When 
 Peter calls on us to follow in His steps he hastens to explain 
 that we are called to have fellowship with Christ in His 
 sufEerings as " Dew Drier." And then the Apostle unerr- 
 ingly points to the inevitable end and how all his Foot- 
 prints on the rough road of life merely lead up to His Nail- 
 prints. The road of life leads up to the Eood of death. I 
 have spoken of " a strange concurrence of circumstances " 
 in our day's doiugs, and by this I mean that it culminated 
 in another coincidence when we came out on a meadow 
 but unfortunately scared ofi game, scared them by our 
 rustling with tell-tale resonance over some dried leaves 
 that telegraphed their treachery to the animals in league 
 (yes !) in league with these very leaves. This reminds us 
 of our easiest error in. Bible study, the easiest, the earliest 
 error in Hebrew where for the first time the phrase is used 
 " the voice of the Lord." It was not the speaking of His 
 voice they heard for that comes later, but it was' the 
 symbolic sound of His footprints when the Lord God was 
 walking in the cool of the day : literally, the " crackling 
 of thorns " spoken of later in Eccl. vii. 6. And surely the 
 loudest voice Christ ever uttered was the sound of His holy 
 footsteps echoing down the centuries. Well might" this 
 be the -first mention in the Bible of such a solemn phrase, 
 " the voice of the Lord " : His talk was His walk and His 
 lip His life. The true Shepherd of the soul who in 
 Chaucer's gracious phrase " first wraught and then taught." 
 He lived the Righteousness that He loved and He died for 
 the sin that He hated. Consistent in His life, the Cross 
 crowns it all as a consistency unto death. The heart of 
 the God-Man had a holy alliance with the hand of the Man 
 who was God, and thus it is with an eye of pity, an arm of 
 strength and a heart of love He saves us to the end. 
 
 But (alas for my sermonising !) what completed our chain 
 of coincidence was when I breasted a hill and looking back 
 saw our caravan coming wriggling along the trail. Only 
 a head here and there was visible above the grass, and often 
 it was moving grass, not moving man, which revealed where 
 it passed. Here, then, in this one-by-one caravan you 
 complete our coincidence, for the prolonged picture in 
 
300 A SURPRISE FROM THE SOUTH 
 
 Hebrews is a long Indian- file of the saints of God with Christ 
 the File Leader away ahead leading many sons unto and into 
 glory. It is in the 11th chapter of Hebrews where we 
 seem to emerge in the open and come into full panoramic 
 view of the long caravan of Christ-followers from Abel 
 downwards with Christ away in the distance breasting 
 the hill of God then disappearing within the veil of azure. 
 He disappears ; then there is a prudential pause after which 
 He who disappears is seen to appear leading back the very 
 same vast caravan of Christians. This explains why that 
 other usage of " the dew-drier " word occurs in the double 
 title, " The Author and Finisher of our faith." This 
 " Author " is only another form for " The File Leader or 
 Dew Drier," because He who disappears is seen to appear 
 to finish what He began. So the two titles are inseparable, 
 for He entered the Holiest as Author, and will come out 
 again as The Finisher of it all when not a hoof will be left 
 behind. He who led the many sons unto and into glory is 
 to return with them at the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ 
 with all His saints. Then we shall see the scars of the 
 " Dew Drier " and all the marks of the wounds He won for 
 us ; He founds His claim on us because of this very thing, 
 " Open to me, my sister, my love, my dove, my undefiled, 
 for my head is filled with dew and my locks with the drops 
 of the night." The Man of Sorrows claims by all the 
 sorrows of His soul for us. No one ever passed that way 
 before, for there was no way to pass until He pioneered it 
 for us. And this is the inscrutable reason why He (who 
 went the way that never was a way until He went it) 
 is Himself caUed " The Way." 
 
 Next comes the great Chitambo's contribution to this 
 Memorial Service. After Tubal cometh most appro- 
 priately Jubal. Replacing the " iron " men, here is the 
 musician fellow who gathers his congregation roimd the 
 faggots and gets every man of them enthralled. So little 
 said, so much suggested. A snatch of wild music, only a 
 line often, and in quaintest Chaucerian Bantu, stirs up 
 all the deeps of memory, every eye peering far into the red 
 ravines and crevices of the fire, pondering life. Only a 
 monochord in a monotone, but more tender than a harp, 
 
A SURPRISE FROM THE SOUTH 301 
 
 more stirring than huntsman's bugle ! Certainly here it 
 is I make a discovery. Chitambo called up the genuine 
 old ballad maker who wept Livingstone dead, and the 
 programme was his singing the very words to the very tune 
 of this famous litany, A glance at the Last Journals 
 version of this death song makes one bow one's head in 
 despair, not a line of it rings true. The monotonous refrain 
 is very simple parsing : 
 
 " TeU me, oh truly tell me 
 Where wiU thou emigrate to f 
 For the charms of our country are gone : 
 Because, alas, Livingstone is dead : 
 An elephant is fallen from a spear wound. 
 Oh, the Lovely One is gone ! " 
 
 As he drones it on and on, your heedless African of the 
 scorching sunshine is now softly meditative, comes far out 
 of his heathen shell and looks across at you, " almost 
 persuaded." He calls this magic music " the evening 
 bath," and small wonder, for does not music wash away from 
 his brain the dust of the hot day ? The fact is, this type 
 of black baUad-monger is one day coming to his own, for 
 surely this is mighty Homer in sable skin come to Ufe again. 
 Let croakers croak, this, supremely this, is the " grand 
 manner " and nothing else ; here is a black bard who sings 
 solid sense into his songs. Waves, say, are his theme ; 
 well, he not only sings about waves, but waves sing audibly 
 in his song. LDce Homer he can easily make a tiny wavelet 
 caress the shore in your ears as he can change that same 
 wave into a league-long roUer crushing the rocks with a 
 roar ! When he turns from waves to wind, the style is the 
 same, and he makes the breeze blow in his song precisely 
 as you can feel the gust of wind rushing out of Homer's 
 pages. And so, too, right round the facts and forces of 
 life : the arrow that hissed past in battle is stiU hissing 
 out of his Bantu song, the crash of splintered bones is still 
 crunching in the black poet's snapshot language. The 
 fact is, we are here at the old tale of the nude man and nude 
 speech : aU artificial trapping must go, and so nudely does 
 he see or hear anything (the same word in Bantu for both) 
 that a gleam of light is still literally gleaming in the word 
 
302 A SURPRISE FROM THE SOUTH 
 
 coined to stereotype the said gleam into speecli. In 
 Exodus, did not the people see the thunderings, and did not 
 John say " I turned to see the voice " ? 
 
 Thus and then it was, we ended the first (and last!) 
 Memorial Service for David Livingstone around " The 
 only tree in the forest," as the natives named it. " My 
 link with Livingstone." Long later, " The Unknown 
 Warrior " was destined to be buried in the same Abbey as 
 Livingstone. And what better epitaph could be found for 
 him, found for " the one who symbolised the many," 
 than these lines beloved of this " no-flowers-by-request " 
 Livingstone of ours ? They are Charles Reade's greatest 
 lines from his greatest book : 
 
 " Not a day passes over the earth but men and women of no 
 note do great deeds, speak great words, and suffer noble 
 sorrows. Of these obscure heroes, philosophers and martyrs, 
 the greater part will never be known tiU that hour, when 
 many that are great shall be smail, and the small great." 
 
 Then we " talked the sun up." Around the roaring 
 logs we had a great time with these Prospectors, they walk- 
 ing and talking telegrams with fresh facts from home — 
 we, walking encyclopsedias of the unknown Far Interior. 
 Where might coal be ? And where copper ? Yea, where, 
 oh, where did the gold lie ? AH of which we answered 
 freely to the tune of thousands, many thousands, many 
 millions of poimds. The steaks of venison sizzling on the 
 fire stung our thin blood. That night we ate the food of 
 Angels, white bread, the first and therefore finest for many 
 a long day. 
 
 I'- This is that same exciting North-and-South meeting that 
 began to take larger proportions far away, when the home 
 newspapers made a mystery about " the mysterious lady." 
 The proverbial inch soon exceeded the traditional eU. 
 One Httle lion incident of that day of surprises, travelling 
 far south, gained doubly in data and distance. It was a 
 mere nothing. My wife had hurt her foot. Was, therefore, 
 being carried, the whole day, for a wonder. There was a 
 weary lion sound asleep by the trail. Just for one tick of 
 time her sagging machila brushed him awake with a roar. 
 And lo ! this inch of fact becomes a fictitious ell. Becomes 
 
A SURPRISE FROM THE SOUTH 303 
 
 the " tremendous stretcher " that Mrs. Crawford rode on 
 the back of a lion up to Livingstone's grave. 
 
 Where there is smoke there must be fire, and in these 
 African legends you generally find a modicum of truth as 
 initial incentive. This time it is not the riding of a lion 
 but a hippo, and many a dozen times this has been done — 
 but a dead one. You killed your hippo ; you waited four 
 hours for it to float, then it does float blown like a balloon. 
 Here at last is your aquatic steed and you ride your dead 
 trophy in to the riVer bank. Where there's smoke there 
 must be fire. 
 
CHAPTER XXIII 
 LEAVING LITE BY THE BACK DOOR 
 
 The moral : Why bear three kinds 
 of trouble when you only need to bear 
 one and even that is not yours to bear 
 but God's. All the trouble you ever 
 had, all you have now, all you expect to 
 have, why be burdened with these three 
 sorts of trouble when God, thy God, 
 would bear them all ? 
 
 20 
 
" This soul shall either rule this body or quit it ? " 
 
 John Foster. 
 
 " Thirteen at our High School class dinner. One hundred and 
 thirteen in our class. Thirty dead. Six of them suicides. The 
 last of the six joined the class the same day as I did." 
 
 J. P. Struthers. 
 
 " I bought Principal Shairp^s book on Burns to read, and have just 
 read this on the poem ' Willie brewed a peck o' maut ' ; ' Within ten 
 years these three men. Burns, Willie Nicol, and Allan Masterton, 
 were all under the turf " 
 
 Idem. 
 
 " IsnH that a wonderful piece of insight into the nature of evils ? — 
 ' Jesus we know and Paul we know, but who are ye ? ' Poor Paul 
 lashed and beaten and shipwrecked, but Satan afraid of him. ' But 
 who are ye ? ' — thaVs the way he answers his own friends." 
 
 Idem. 
 
CHAPTER XXIII 
 LEAVING LIFE BY THE BACK DOOR 
 
 I THINK I have already said that we Missionaries found 
 the oyster, and other people get the pearl. But with 
 the finding of gold, these good fellows, the Prospec- 
 tors, are a new figure in the Far Interior. You see him, 
 don't you ? Lean, brown and pleasantly plain. It seems 
 a physical impossibility for this prospector fellow to wear 
 anything heavier than shirt sleeves. Shirt sleeves and torn 
 khaki trousers, the said tear having been laboriously 
 mended with clumsy, man-like stitches. Disdaining a 
 hebnet, the African sun has rewarded him with the tradi- 
 tional burnt-brick complexion of the tropics. Accustomed 
 to be farther south in his travels, he is quite excited at 
 getting so far north, and although only on latitude 13°, 
 he expects one of these days to " go jam-smash against 
 the Equator," He prefers minerals to cereals and despises 
 farming. Likes stock but not farm-stock ; prefers shares 
 to ploughshares. This is the man who meets you in a 
 forest, and, balancing his cigarette daintily between his 
 first and second finger, tells you smilingly that he prefers 
 to seek for lost gold rather than lost sheep. Missions to 
 the African is to him a lark of the first dimensions : 
 " Oh, yes," says Mr. Prospector, " I believe in you good 
 fellows : you seek very high ends, but I prefer high 
 dividends ! " 
 
 Let me beg this man's photo to present to you : here it is. 
 A rolling stone aU his life, this particular prospector has 
 tried everything under the sun, and ascribes all his failures 
 to " bad luck." Starting say in the City, his firm goes 
 bankrupt or his heart fails : he scrapes up a few pounds, 
 goes to Canada, works as a farm hand and then takes up 
 a farm himself, his crops get frozen, or he simply " can't 
 
 307 
 
308 LEAVING LIFE BY THE BACK DOOR 
 
 stand it," so he works his passage home on a cattle-boat 
 and turns up at the paternal dwelling (if there is one) 
 with no possessions except a spare pair of socks. But the 
 door is slammed and a request proffered through the keyhole 
 that he should have sufficient sense of decency to go to the 
 dogs well out of their sight. He loafs in England a while, 
 enlists, gets his corporal's stripe, promptly loses it for 
 fighting his sergeant, and buys his discharge ; thereafter 
 he is a bookmaker's clerk, tout for a window-cleaning firm, 
 advance bill-poster to a touring theatrical firm, and any and 
 all of the hundred-and-one odd things peculiar to his like. 
 Then comes war as a boon, so when a Kruger determines 
 to stagger hiunanity, your square peg gets into the roundest 
 of all holes. He sails to the Cape on a tramp steamer, 
 deserts, joins a Colonial regiment, and goes all through the 
 campaign, getting captured and wounded, but reveUing 
 in the excitement and uncertainty and constant change. 
 You ask him to a good square meal, and the delightful 
 fellow will make a mock plan of campaign on the table 
 with your cups and saucers. Demonstrating with the only 
 two forks how they engineered the Wakkerstrom turning 
 movement, building a Vaal Krantz with the Bovril-tin 
 salt-cellars, and fijaaUy riding into Ladysmith on the 
 mustard-pot. 
 
 Eeappears in England after the war, does this typical 
 Prospector, and you might discover him working as a groom 
 in a bus-horse stable with the imminent prospect of losing 
 his job owing to the introduction of motor-buses. But 
 he does not worry : by the law of compensation he is blessed 
 with perennial optimism, " Something '11 come along all 
 right," he says, " maybe there'll be another war presently. 
 Got any baccy ? " The writer might, indeed, add that the 
 prophecy came true and something did " turn up," for here 
 he is, Mr. RoUing-stone Prospector endlessly turning up in 
 and around the Katanga. But as metallic stones are not roll- 
 ing stones like himself, and moreover as they do not oblige 
 him by turning up, in the volitional sense, he must " get 
 a waggle on " and turn them up in his quest for quartz. 
 Nevertheless this good fellow who comes out of the grass 
 to greet you with boisterous cordiality can make the average 
 
LEAVING LIFE BY THE BACK DOOR 309 
 
 Missionary blush, in one particular. The snug and cosy 
 Mission is fast losing all the old laurels for roughiag it, 
 whereas here is a bold tramp who cuts across country for 
 hundreds of miles with only a blanket and iron pot as com- 
 plete outfit. Like the treasure hid in the field, here is a 
 man who strips himself of all until he finds it. Indeed, 
 only the little, imtrammelled prospector can hope to poke 
 into aU the holes in the land. 
 
 Of course, this historic North-and-South meeting of ours 
 is more prophetic than personal : this is the thin edge of the 
 great coming wedge. Wave upon wave wiU soon break in 
 on us from the south and mimng towns will spring up aU 
 along the soon-to-come railway. Even now far, very far 
 to the south, the towns " on the edge of cultivation " caU 
 covetously to many of our young natives, and away they 
 go to lose head and heart in the whirl of the " tin " towns. 
 Goliath, of Gath is down there, and happy is the young man 
 who has the Gospel stone in his sUng. By going there they 
 can make big money and big mistakes, yet it aU begins in 
 a simple unsuspicious manner. The economic pressure 
 on the tribe where the Government demands silver taxa- 
 tion forces them to roam far afield to find the needful. 
 It is not the deliberate deed of an up-to-date Demas, but 
 something, more insidious, more subtle, soon sucks him 
 into the whirlpool. And all because he is caught between 
 his necessity and his inadequate resources. Down there 
 lie is now removed from his old folks, old friends, old 
 home by a month's travel, with practically no means 
 of communication. Thus no supplies come back imtil 
 he comes back, if ever. 
 
 And do we face this phase of failure in an adequate 
 manner ? Or is it only a matter for " texts and tears " ? 
 No, we have a good workshop here where many a lad has 
 got a good chance, and this year we have employed hun- 
 dreds in building our new plan. But, even this is only 
 fumbling on the fringe of things, and away they go in 
 hundreds to return never, never more. It is the old 
 story ; first the mess of red pottage and then the exceeding 
 bitter cry. They did not know ! they did not know ! 
 The old men put it with much shaking of the head thus : 
 
310 LEAVING LIFE BY THE BACK DOOR 
 
 the small snail puffed itself out witli pride when he got 
 into the large empty lobster shell : but that night he died 
 of cold. And there is many a slimy snail-like soul that 
 makes for a palace to find it a prison. Then along comes 
 that insufferable Son of Pride, by name Pomposity, and 
 inflates it like a windbag. Thus what with warm wind 
 inside, and cold wind outside, he dies the death of a dunce — 
 hell is fuU of such. 
 
 In later days, with the advance of far-away civilisation 
 from the south, one is rather dejected to hear of repeated 
 suicides, lonely men, prowling prospectors or the like. 
 When a forlorn man has all his time to himself, the time 
 in its tedium becomes a sort of eternity in its endlessness. 
 Hence his ending what would not quickly enough end itself 
 — suicide, " leaving life by the back door," as the African 
 puts it. It is a poor beetle-headed expedient, for in trying 
 to escape the " eternity " of time hanging heavy on his 
 hand he plimges into the real one that never ticked a tick 
 of time. All the home these good fellows have is a mud 
 cabin in the far forest, a one-room shanty with no chimney, 
 for would not the grass roof have revenge ? Like a head 
 without eyes in it, like a face without a smile, such is this 
 cheerless room without a fireplace. The only window in 
 the place is a hole here and there left unplastered in the 
 mud walls, a house with plenty of air but no atmosphere. 
 Here and there bits of the mud wall are hidden behind 
 photos impaled on pins like entomological specimens. 
 Some of his old pals, some of his old girls, some of the old 
 boy himself, aU jagged to the wall like dead beetles or 
 butterflies, and — and there he lies himself dead with a 
 bullet in the brain. 
 
 A bit of a theologian in the old days, he broke, so he 
 said, on the Four Gospels, but his very petulance on this 
 subject of The Synoptics made one suspect that he only 
 broke with them because The Four were out to break him. 
 At any rate his fancied non-agreement of Matthew, Mark, 
 Luke, and John seemed to be silently settled for me by 
 four tell-tale photos (the exact coincidental number !), 
 four decisive photos stuck on the dead man's mud walls. 
 These fearful four, d la the Four Gospels, were all snaps 
 
LEAVING LIFE BY THE BACK DOOR 311 
 
 of the poor old chap himself, and looked far more difierent 
 than any seeming discrepancy between Mark and Luke, 
 between Matthew and John, or between the latter and all 
 the former. Absurdly different from each other as these 
 four photos of the same man were, who could see any con- 
 ceivable unity in the diversity of such varied forms of the 
 self-same person : (1) as a raw lad, then (2) as a bearded 
 man, then (3) in the complete transformation of a colonial 
 outfit, and finally (4) a home-made snap of the same good- 
 fellow under vertical rays in shirt and trousers. Four 
 phases of the same man, four photos looking down on the 
 dead-and-gone doubter and declaring that Matthew, Mark, 
 Luke, and John have the same unity in diversity cementing 
 the certainty of their credentials. Alas, this tale is killed 
 in the telling, but to my dying day I shall certainly see these 
 two sets of Four playing at hide-and-seek in my brain. The 
 Four Gospels that never lied to any man, and the four con- 
 tradictory photos of my dead friend. Four phases of the 
 Saviour, four snaps of a .suicide. 
 
 The other day we cut down a half-dead man who had 
 
 hanged himself because a fire in his grass hut had burned 
 
 him out, destroying his " papers " of which he was (so 
 
 well he might be !) very proud. Seeing them destroyed 
 
 he resolved to destroy himself, and the deed of death was 
 
 almost accomplished. He was rescued back to life. And 
 
 what a royal return it has been ! There he is saved for 
 
 eternity, and rejoicing in the God who called him back to 
 
 prepare for the call of Heaven to come up higher. When 
 
 the chains of sin are struck ofi these days the first blow of 
 
 the hammer goes for their chain of gambling. The natives 
 
 are all dice devotees, and were accustomed to spend hours 
 
 of time and their world of wealth on the throw of the dice. 
 
 Now, with no pious prompting from us they learn that the 
 
 best throw of the dice is to throw it away. It is that 
 
 " Calvary-verse " does it all, I mean, where Christ's 
 
 murderer gambled for his garment : that is enough for the 
 
 clear-eyed soul who is out for the real thing. He is done 
 
 with juggling of any sort, word juggling or dice juggling, 
 
 and Christ's murderers are going to be no guide for him. 
 
 But mark you, a mere anti-gambling crusade could not 
 
312 LEAVING LIFE BY THE BACK DOOR 
 
 have produced these results, not a bit of it. Make it an 
 anti-sin crusade and you have the lesser contained in 
 the greater : tackle the root and the fruits are finished. 
 Then it is the man gets such a surprise that he turns the 
 laugh against himself saying the sUly old saw : " Ducks 
 lay eggs, but geese lay wagers." A man can stop gambling 
 and for all that be as bad a customer as ever : in other 
 words, he who bets is a better and he who does not bet is — 
 well, no better if he is still in his sins. It is not givitig this 
 rescued man too much away to say that one half of his 
 name is " Thomas " and his gloomy face always reminded 
 me of the sensible arrangement of the Church Festival 
 where St. Thomas gets the shortest day and longest 
 possible night. Poor " Thomas," doubt does not mean 
 much daylight. 
 
 But do not forget that on this subject the natives lead 
 the mad way. Here are three broken-hearted Africans 
 who " cut the knot " (what a bull !) by hanging themselves. 
 (1) A father hears of his only child's death and ofi he rushes 
 to hang himself. (2) A native mine- worker returns from the 
 far south to find his wife unfaithful, the wife he slaved for. 
 So spuming all his gains he hangs himself. (3) A daughter 
 learns at the ferry crossing that mother (" mama," the same 
 old word) is dead, so she defies life and dashes in among 
 the crocs. All proving (oh my brothers !) that the sad, 
 sad old world is kin. That the heart knoweth its own 
 bitterness. That " ilka blade o' grass keps its ain wee 
 drap o' dew." 
 
 Far from the cooler, crisper air of the North Temperate 
 Zone there is tragedy, I suggest, lurking here in the tropics. 
 A high dignitary I knew landed in Africa with the usual 
 vigorous stock of youthful manhood. His mental history 
 was mapped out in epochs, laps of intellectual territory, 
 so to speak, in which some " immortal " ruled his brain 
 with a rod of iron. Sitting out, one starry night, he took 
 me away back in thought over his map of mental epochs, 
 an Emerson love, a Buskin love, a Spencer love, each and 
 all in evolutionary sequence writing for his obedience the 
 sort of Statute Book of his soul. (No Jesus Christ love, 
 mark you and no Bible as life's chartacross the ocean waste.) 
 
LEAVING LIFE BY THE BACK DOOR 313 
 
 All this, superimposed on a good Cambridge course with 
 the Church as goal. Religion, of course, has gone by the 
 board : all that remains is the mere memorised phrases of 
 the catechist. Thus the years pass, the ceaseless ebb and 
 flow of his poor tidal brain finding no rest for soul or body. 
 Meantime, the spick-and-span graduate has gone the way 
 of the tropics, and finally " King " Huxley is enthroned in 
 the citadel of his life, the dreary last chapter of his soul's 
 history rounding ofE in mad negation ; no heaven, no hell, 
 no anything, for does not Hegel say " being = not being " ? 
 The precision and glitter of Huxley's language did it all, 
 but watch the ugly issue of this " no hell " fiction. Had 
 he not, like the old Latin poet, dropped a plummet down the 
 deep, broad universe and said, " No God " ? But watch 
 the developments, I say. Morphia is now his solace, seduc- 
 tive morphia that promises to fight negation by, at least, 
 building for him " a castle in Spain " of most gorgeous and 
 stately proportions. Thus slowly, thus subtly the slavery 
 begins that will never end, and all to the tune of " no heU " 
 beneath and " no heaven " above. (N.B. — ^Man in all 
 lands has an aching void, and must have something positive 
 to grip at.) A fight only freshens faith, but with no nucleal 
 belief all is vague dreamy nonsense. And, remember, 
 in Africa it is fact that " to him that hath " (this nucleal 
 thing called faith) shall be given : and from him that 
 " hath not " (this initial imperative) shall be taken away 
 even that which he hath. It takes a Hving fish to swim 
 up-stream. 
 
 But now Nemesis is advancing swiftly on this morphia 
 victim, the vice fastens firmly on him with an iron grip. 
 Beginning with a rose-coloured paradise, it ends with hell 
 on earth ; bom of negation this drug habit swings full 
 circle into the most positive slavery on earth. Morphia 
 strangling his soul in awful earnest, the same cheat that, 
 in the first instance, seduced the weary man as an angel 
 of Light. Once as straight as a pine, he is now broken- 
 backed, prematurely old ; face florid, pufiy, and telling 
 the tale of a soft, flabby mind. Slavery, mark you, is no 
 mere catch metaphor in this chronicle, for the passion for 
 this poison is, at last, so mechanical that the will is wholly 
 
314 LEAVING LIFE BY THE BACK DOOR 
 
 inoperative and the whole fibre and constitution of the 
 mind sapped. But again watch, and tremble at the crush- 
 ing climax of this tragedy : "no hell " is the old mocldng 
 echo of it all, and the louder the non-existence of hell is 
 proclaimed the plainer do you behold a real tangible hell 
 coming out on the road of life to visibly clutch the victim. 
 Hundreds of men die in feather beds, and only wake up to 
 find themselves in heU ; here is an instance of the hell that 
 was denied as non-existent actually projecting itself out 
 into Time as a living hell and defying denial. 
 
 And the end ? A lonely river and a lonely man ; a 
 revolver and a plan to commit suicide on the edge of the 
 flood so that the bullet having found its billet the rushing 
 river would complete the Huxley-tragedy, and destroy all 
 traces by carrying off the corpse. But unlike the accurate 
 revolver that did the deed of death with precision, that 
 rushing stream turned traitor and failed to fulfil the promise 
 of secreting the poor body. Thus the morphia that mocked 
 in life, mocked also in death, this final trick being only a 
 symbol of the long life of seductive lies. Why add any 
 conventional tag by way of pointing a moral 1 Rather, let 
 us write our sad Mc jacet by that dark-flowing river. 
 
 The poet John Davidson, friend of my boyhood, died a 
 suicide's death of despair. The Davidson who deserved 
 literary immortality if only for one of his epigrams, 
 " There is no illusion so great as disillusion." Poor Fleet 
 Street hack, why not live a little longer by living your own 
 epigram ? Live and not die, by laughing at your disillusion 
 as a delusion. Like a very stone of Sisyphus back it comes 
 on himself, his own weighty word of warning. The 
 disillusion was so deadly an illusion that it did for him. 
 Such is the futility of mere clever phrasing — ^like the staring 
 eyes in the heads of dead and flayed oxen in butchers' 
 shops. 
 
 It is one of the charms of the African forest that you never 
 can tell. I met coming along the trail a curious couple 
 of roaming Hebrews who talked anything but Abraham, 
 Isaac, and Jacob, let alone Jesus Christ. The elder of 
 the two, a good-hearted waster, sits down on a forest log 
 and after many days of enforced reticence wants a long 
 
LEAVING LIFE BY THE BACK DOOR 315 
 
 " bottled-up " talk commonly called (commonly indeed) 
 " swopping lies." But it must be on his own conditions 
 tliis terrible talk, for as he spies tlie audacious end of their 
 own Epistle to the Hebrews peeping surreptitiously out of 
 my pocket he suddenly squares up belligerently, " Now, 
 then, none of those yams about canker worms, or hell fire, or 
 any trinomings of that description." What then are we 
 going to talk about with these two candid customers ? 
 (Verbal ratio : one grain of wheat to two bushels of chafi.) 
 Of only common capacities, they seem to have spent all 
 their available time dividing the yearnings of their spirits 
 between strong drink and dog-fights. Would you believe it : 
 from such an imlikely jack-in-the-box source, out jumps the 
 historic old Jew making a very funny fight for his " faith " ? 
 They talk the Old Testament as though it was the end 
 of the world ; thought of it, I mean, as people did the Old 
 World before Christopher discovered the New. All I 
 said seemed as simple as A B C (to me !), but this very 
 metaphor of the A B C is as exact as exacting. (I mean, 
 just as the Hebrew alphabet begins at the opposite 
 end of the paper from our English, even so with our 
 opposing watchwords, Moses and Christ, Law and Gospel). 
 No wonder we were always crossing each other, seeing 
 we did it so Literally in this wrong-way-round mode of 
 reading the O.T. and N.T. Then it was (1) " Do," now it is 
 " Done " ; then it was (2) " Do and live," now it is 
 " Live and do " ; then it was (3) " Often," now it is 
 " Once " ; then it was (4) " Wages," now it is " Gift " ; 
 then (5) the law blotted out the sinner, now it blots out 
 the sin ; then (6) it was stripes and stones for the rebellious 
 son, now it is the kiss and the best robe ; then (7) all 
 the men of Shechem were slain, whereas in the Gospel the 
 men of that very same town came to Christ. 
 
 The Law left them " without excuse," but Grace gives 
 " an advocate " : it stopped every mouth, whereas in 
 Eom. X every mouth is opened. So I rattled it all ofi with 
 rejoicing, like a true son of Martin Luther, closing on the 
 crescendo with the contrastive climax of the first acts of 
 Moses and Christ : I mean, where Moses' first deed in 
 Exod. ii is to slay a man, whereas Christ's fi^st act recorded 
 
316 LEAVING LIFE BY THE BACK DOOR 
 
 in Mark is the healing of a man. Alas, in fog I found them, 
 in fog I left them, and who knows if these very men may 
 not live to look upon the face of Him they have pierced 
 and mourn for so rejecting Him ia the far-away forest of 
 
 Central Africa ? 
 
CHAPTER XXIV 
 LIVINGSTONE'S "LOBSTER" ARABS 
 
 Livingstone's lip and life were in 
 agreement. Following up his last trail, 
 here it is we find a rare and irre- 
 coverable essence of his final example and 
 endurance. 
 
" / can be rich without money." 
 
 Livingstone. 
 " The day of Africa is yet to come." 
 
 Idem. 
 " A life of selfishness is one of misery." 
 
 Idem. 
 " Be manly Christians and never do a mean thing." 
 
 Idem. 
 '' Depend upon it, a kind word or deed is never lost." 
 
 Idem. 
 
CHAPTER XXIV 
 LIVINGSTONE'S "LOBSTER" ARABS 
 
 HERE we come across old derelict Arabs who were 
 Livingstone's friends. Some men like salmon 
 never go back, some men like lobsters cannot go 
 back. Dotted aU over our route you encounter little groups 
 of these " lobster " Arabs, lost traders from the coast. 
 They have been thrown high-and-dry by the waves of 
 circumstances iuto Central Africa, and like a lobster have 
 neither desire (?) nor ability to get back to the coast again. 
 Rip van Winkle every man of them, their dates are either 
 aU out or aU too ancient, socially sound asleep for years. 
 The charming polish of some of these old-world gents is 
 a nice feature of their kind. 
 
 They drench you with showers of absurd adulation ; 
 their phrases full of polite frills, not mere " salaams " 
 but millions, then millions more. Thus : " Many com- 
 pliments, indeed, so many that the sand on the sea-shore 
 is inadequate to indicate the number of same." This 
 they twirl round to " ilia u wapo usingisini," meaning 
 " salaams at all times, aU places, excepting when you are 
 asleep, i.e. which would only disturb you." This fitted in 
 finely with Livingstone's own gentlemanly mode of making 
 Africa safe for those who followed up his trail through the 
 grass. The Semitic sons of men are solid on this basic 
 demand for decency in verbal approach to each other, and 
 what is the Arab " salaam " but only the local Chivemba 
 word of felicitation, " Mutende," meaning " Peace " ? 
 Once an invocation, alas ! in these war-bled times, with the 
 Mazitu attacking everywhere, it is an interrogation, " Is 
 it peace ? " 
 
 This SwahiH of theirs is the true lingua franca of Africa, 
 and probably the various Missions have lost years of pro- 
 
 319 
 
320 LIVINGSTONE'S "LOBSTER" ARABS 
 
 gress by dissipating their energies in local dialects, mere 
 sprats of speecli soon to be swallowed by the Swahili 
 whale. Were not Livingstone's last words in Swahili ? 
 Besides, to a Missionary, is there no thriU in the thought 
 that in such words as " blood " {damu), " bless " (barak), 
 " seven'" (saba), " the grave " {kaburi), he is using the 
 selfsame words that the other David used thousands of 
 years ago ? These Arabs teU me that Livingstone gained 
 great prestige because he came straight from the Sultan 
 of Zanzibar, having presented him with a beautiful steamer, 
 the gift of the Indian Government. Thus he came in on 
 the crest of the wave, armed with their Sultan's passport. 
 Being a doctor, too, worked wonders. Often aU the 
 medicine they take is a line of the Koran written in ink, 
 then washed off with water down the throat. 
 
 Several times this journey some of these fine old Arabs, 
 with an air of faded gentility came out of the grass by the 
 trail, to chat of days long past. Livingstone's is the magic 
 name : " Bwana Dawid " they call lum most familiarly, 
 but familiarity is eminently the wong idea. He is plain 
 " David " in the same stalwart sense as Abraham and 
 Solomon are majestic men of no surname. They don't 
 know that it is only the Christian name of one who was very 
 much a Christian, but they do know the authentic latter. 
 The only surname the Arab believes in is the Highland 
 " Mac " which he uses in his " Bin," and the curious pro- 
 prietary rights they claim over the memory of " David " 
 seems to mean that they, the Arabs, gave Livingstone his 
 convoy into Central Africa as the sort of Cook's excursion 
 people of those days. The far interior they claimed as 
 Arab Hinterland and it was duly garrisoned by " black- 
 flag " hordes of slavers. One such old gentleman told 
 me that he had met Livingstone in Itawa, when the 
 Doctor had run out of supplies, and that he had given 
 him cofiee. Then, again, when the lads passed up from 
 the south with his embalmed body, they all turned out 
 with Komba Komba's men near Nsama's and fixed a volley 
 of honour. Thus, far away in the wild bush, Westminster 
 Abbey was antedated, and by the Arabs, of all folk. They 
 wiU give you hours of it, this Doctor D. L. subject. A 
 
V T^I'K'VL AJtAi; I'AXATIC AXII HIS MORE DltES.SV l-'(.ll,f.l IW Kj;s, 
 
 320 1 
 
LIVINGSTONE'S "LOBSTER" ARABS 321 
 
 clever mental ptoto they have of liiin, this " Dawid " of 
 theirs : hair reddish brown, bright eyes hazel, teeth 
 thinned with bad fare : height — little over ordinary, 
 with slight stoop on shoulders. Exactly Stanley's 
 farewell picture of him at Ujiji, with this addition, a hearty 
 laugh from head to heels, the laugh of the whole man. 
 My own servant of years joined in these same honours 
 farther north. This Arab, Ali Masi, is a smith by trade, 
 blunt by nature, and long ago, when a mere boy, he was up 
 north around Unyanyembe. At sundown who should 
 warily move in by the south gate but a small group of jaded 
 men, staggering under a burden tied to a pole. The burden 
 was carefully placed on a bed of potatoes, and the famished 
 carriers began to negotiate for a needed supper. A little 
 later and the whispers went round that it was a dead white 
 man they were carrying, Livingstone, en route for West- 
 minster Abbey. 
 
 Another delightful affectation of these derelict Arabs, 
 who wiU never sight Zanzibar or Muscat again, is the vain 
 way they flourish their bygone knowledge of European 
 politics. In 1895, here am I most anxiously asked by one 
 old gentleman if the Franco-German War is finished yet. 
 Very fondly did he linger over the bellicose combination 
 of these European names, relishing the very delicious idea 
 of Allah having so permitted two great " Christian " nations 
 to hew each other to pieces. So, too, with his sage guess 
 about the " Cotton " war, as he called the North and 
 South conflict in America. As the Arab's famous texture 
 is " Americani " they somehow think that that old war 
 may break out again, and limit the African cotton supply. 
 Fancy being quizzed solemnly by a sleepy old Arab *'/ the 
 American Civil War was over yet ? The " nephews," 
 the Americans are called, and they humiliate the English 
 by reminding them that they are dependent on the United 
 States for their principal export ! " Cotton-beggars " is 
 our name, for we use " Americani " calico. To all of which 
 I retort in my best John-BuU manner : " You Arabs seem 
 to forget that the principal export of Great Britain to the 
 United States is the United States itself." 
 
 But the Franco-German War is only yesterday's news 
 
 21 
 
322 LIVINGSTONE'S "LOBSTER" ARABS 
 
 compared with the ancient history they gossip over, 
 " Magueda ! Magueda ! " was a name I heard them use ; 
 and who was this " Magueda," please 1 " Oh," said the 
 Arabs, " she was the mother of the Abyssinians." " And 
 who was their father ? " Oh," they replied, " you don't 
 know your history : ' Magueda ' (or Makeda) Queen of 
 Sheba was the wife of King Solomon of Jerusalem, and 
 her son was educated in Judea by the priests. That is 
 why the Abyssinians hate us Arabs." Arab literature has 
 it that in those long-gone days a venturesome General 
 of Solomon's army — ^Boul-Boul, i.e. the nightingale — 
 penetrated south to Saba extolling the Queen and land 
 thereof. Then came another embassy from Jerusalem, 
 but Makeda only sent rich presents in response. Finally 
 in the 24th year of Solomon's reign, away she went herself 
 north to Jerusalem through Egypt, hers the first real 
 " camel corps " to cross the desert." 
 
 And there they are to-day between latitude 10° and 15°, 
 their priests getting up at 3 a.m. in knots of two and three 
 to chant the Psalms of David in wUd, melodious manner. 
 Islam, long ago, would have swept them off the map but 
 for Mohammed's promise never to touch them because of 
 one kind deed they did in the fifth year of his propaganda. 
 Hard pressed, he sent eighty of his people for shelter, and 
 the kind treatment they received made him pledge peace 
 with them for all time. Thus one kind deed saved Chris- 
 tianity when aU around Islam had stormed and swept away 
 every other rival. In fact, through the haze of history this 
 one kind deed began to assume such fantastic proportions 
 that the Arabs believe God will punish them in the last 
 days through the Abyssinians destroying the Kabba ! 
 
 Superstitious as they are, probably this is the unlikely 
 point where we not only approach but reach the first real 
 conversion from Islam to Christianity. It was even before 
 The Prophet died. One of Mohammed's own companions 
 left Arabia, went to Abyssinia, and there the impact of a 
 living Christianity, although superstitious, opened the eyes 
 of that Arab so that he wrote to Mohammed, as the Arabs 
 themselves relate : " I now see clearly, and you are still 
 only blinking." Imagine his surprise on reading this 
 
LIVINGSTONE'S "LOBSTER" ARABS 323 
 
 apostate epistle. Also the vision of his taking a long breath, 
 as he searched his mind for some expletive that might suit 
 the emergency. 
 
 Another good old retainer of mine for years is Jmna 
 (lit. Friday), a polite little Arab this who, however poor, 
 always manages to keep his turban neatly set on his head. 
 An old sailor on a slave dhow, he has spent most of 
 his time cruising up the East African coast as far as the 
 Red Sea, with an occasional venture into the Persian 
 Gulf. Cast up high and dry into the far interior by the 
 metaphoric waves of his stormy slave cruising, the natives 
 are agape at his salt-sea tales. Around the camp fire he 
 sways his listeners as he describes the wonders of the 
 Indian Ocean, and ranges from whale stories to " man-o'- 
 wari " encounters. This latter of course is only another 
 iron whale spouting water at the bow. Captured and 
 transferred aboard an English gunboat, the thrill of warmth 
 around the engine room is still a treasure of the mind. 
 " Why did I leave the ocean," you ask, " to come in here 
 to dwell in the long grass ? I left it because there were not 
 only those sharks under water, but also these ' man-o'-wari ' 
 sharks above." 
 
 Salt water seems to splash in all his speech, but the most 
 touching of his sayings was about the Grave of Livingstone's 
 Heart. They told us of the dying doctor's moribund pain, 
 and his never-a-murmur acquiescence in it all. Then it 
 was the old salt produced his usual suitable splash of salt 
 water in the speech, Penyi wimbi na milango i papo, " At 
 the harbour bar just where the breaker curls in foam there 
 it is, just there, you find the entrance through the reef ! " 
 Surely here it was he antedated Tennyson's " Crossing the 
 Bar," for this is an old Arab sailor saying as they see the 
 dawn breaking on the reefs with only that one tell-tale curl 
 of foam to guide them inside the haven. Good for you, 
 old Juma : Livingstone's last agony was only at the 
 entrance of eternal rest and rejoicing : no splash of foam 
 means no entrance to the harbour ; the higher the wave, 
 the surer the sign of haven ; if we suffer we shall reign. 
 
 Great explorers in modem times have wearisomely 
 run in and out of Africa only under the sheltering wing of 
 
324 LIVINGSTONE'S "LOBSTER" ARABS 
 
 these Arab guides and guardians. Yet the inevitable 
 retrospectivebook of travel, so full of ego-prestige, generally 
 ignores this Arab as first and final factor in the whole iti- 
 nerary. Picking him up at the coast with all his baggage, 
 did not the said Arab carry the said Traveller across moun- 
 tain and flood as though he were a hamper labelled 
 " Fragile " ? This is not hyperbole : literally, an Arab 
 has been overheard saying respectfully of the white occu- 
 pant of a hammock : " Pole, Pole ! [gently, gently !] or 
 you will tumble the baby ! " Fancy a famous man 
 known in many a home, nay, every home in England, called 
 by the Arabs pathetically " a baby." Ever so gently, 
 furtively, as it were, they carry him dry-shod over every 
 stream, depositing the Bwana Mukubwa as tenderly as a 
 China teacup on the opposite bank — the eloquent Arab 
 look all the time seeming to say patronisingly to the 
 inflated foreigner, " You are a good little boy, and you shall 
 have jam with your tea." Yet the subsequent English 
 " Book of Travels " will run into several editions. Of 
 that same traveller I have heard that same Arab say : 
 " Mr. Fulano [i.e. Mr. So-and-So] is a bad man, for iustead 
 of rationing us, he served us out cartridges, and told us to 
 take food by force." Of another " great " German explorer 
 an Arab told me that he injected morphia the whole 
 " personally conducted Arab tour," and finally bade him 
 good-bye with the words : " Kwahedi ! I am now a great 
 man in Europe." 
 
 More or less (and much more than less) Livingstone 
 entered a world of unfriendly faces every step he took with 
 these Arabs. This was the price he had to pay for their 
 " caravan " companionship {wa safari moja). The Sultan of 
 Zanzibar's letter did it : and the many Sydes, Jumas, and 
 Abdullahs he met, all true sons of the Sultan, were forced 
 to honour the royal letter Livingstone bore. More than 
 a mere passport, it was a blank cheque, his producing of 
 which meant a share of their suppUes. Ever-welcome 
 supplies in a far-off land where, as Punch put it in 1869, 
 " You are heartily welcome to any refreshments which you 
 may bring with you ! " Yet these sons of darkness were 
 slavers and murderers, and many a time Livingstone was 
 
A 'rVi'H'AL t'lsfnX(.;-\\KIi; LI\'1.\( ;ST(IXI-: HAD TO TACIvLI': l\ \ 
 :\riii;ii;uxi» cdXDiTloX. 
 
 Among tliu la^t words ho wrote were liirsu: '" isfli A]»iil. On h.-;i\iiiu- Uir vilhitit- 
 
 w(.- forded the Kazya ... a large weir spiinuLMl i1.;inil we went on (In- luwer sidr 
 
 (if thiat : fish are rctiiniiiig now with (he falliiiL;- waters ;itid an- t;-iii<lr(l iiitn llir 
 
 l■usil-eoIle'^ srl for them." 
 
 :i^4J 
 
LIVINGSTONE'S "LOBSTER" ARABS 825 
 
 lied about, even the Nyangwe massacre being blamed to 
 his men. We had the same bar sinister coming in from the 
 Atlanticwhere we crossed Livingstone's route up to Loanda. 
 We, too, had noonday slavers in our caravan, yet not an 
 onward, inward step could we make without them. All 
 very regrettable, but all very necessary in a land where 
 the caravan is its only means of transportation. 
 
 My point is this : a glance at Livingstone's Last Journals 
 win remind you how he, like ourselves, only followed 
 in the wake of roaming Arabs. When, therefore, we speak 
 of Burton as discovering Lake Tanganyika, or Speke the 
 Victoria Nyanza, we are only fixmbling on the fringe of 
 things. The Arabs, claiming centuries of priority, were 
 as truly and technically explorers as the EngUsh ; only 
 their R.G.S. happened to be in Zanzibar and Muscat. 
 True, these Arabs were only rogues who came to fatten 
 on honest men, but that does not and cannot tamper with 
 their rights to be acknowledged as the pioneers of the 
 African trail. English explorers arrived only to borrow 
 that Semitic route first cut by Arab sandals ; and long 
 before a European ever dreamed of penetrating our far 
 interior, wave after wave of Arab traders had poured in 
 from the east coast. Of course, these caravan routes were 
 the same old narrow thing resembling a wheel rut, but to 
 this day they are our only authentic " short cuts." 
 
 Nor did they pioneer the trail only. The Arabs made 
 maps when England was benighted, witness the word 
 " azimuth," not an English but an Arabic term. The 
 African map of the Arab Abulfeda may have been crude, 
 but at least it was not arm-chair geography, for hundreds 
 of wanderers in the unknown had added their quota to 
 that cartographic whole. So, too, the map of the Arab 
 Edrisi. Even from Zanzibar, as far back as a.d. 1154, 
 he got data of a kind. Of course, these Arabs also wrote 
 books of travel, and not all of the romantic and rambling 
 sort. Mas'oudi's record, for instance, is as old as a.d. 943, 
 and his title was, The Golden Pampas or Savannahs. 
 Here you find the data of a man who spoke in the first 
 person, and had crossed over from Arabia to the east 
 coast of Africa several times. Even the most modem 
 
326 LIVINGSTONE'S "LOBSTER" ARABS 
 
 grammarians cannot better his tenth-century statement 
 that the Bantu " express themselves with elegance, and are 
 not wanting in orators." Again, when he speaks of their 
 " filed teeth," we know where we are. It is of authentic 
 hints of this sort that the negro himself says : " Where 
 there is smoke there must be a fire." Compare this sen- 
 sible, and earlier, historian, with the erratic Persian Abd- 
 Er-Razak, who as late as 1442 said of Muscat : " The heat 
 was so intense that it burned the marrow in the bones, the 
 sword in its scabbard melted like wax, and the gems that 
 adorned the handle of the dagger were reduced to coal. 
 In the plains the chase became a matter of perfect ease, 
 for the desert was filled with roasted gazelles " ! 
 
 Next to the Jews they hate Romanists, for the Arab 
 grudge is that when the Roman Church could not win a 
 Moslem convert by heart-to-heart appeal, a prince of that 
 church resolved to break them with their own rod of iron. 
 This was Cardinal Lavigerie, foimder of the " White 
 Fathers," and a possible pope had he lived. As the history 
 of Missions to Islam has proved, the Moslem heart is sterile 
 soil, so the cunning (mujinga) Cardinal abandoned the old 
 frontal attack common in India, and took the Mohamme- 
 dan position by a flank movement. Bitter experience had 
 taught him a lesson. As far back as 1867 he began the 
 long agony of the see of Algiers, the Arab scorning the very 
 notion of such impossible monkery. A poor pendulum of 
 preaching this for Arab Algeria, the Moslem son of Shem 
 with half a dozen wives versus the papist son of Japhet 
 with no wife at all ! What then was this subtle strategy 
 of shrewd Charles Martial Allemand Lavigerie ? Answer : 
 the old Roman solution of force, for who but Peter cut off 
 the high-priest's servant's ear ? This, in two words, is 
 what he did. Rousing Europe for an anti-slavery crusade 
 he successfully compromised nearly all the European 
 powers, and forced their hands into an anti-Arab campaign, 
 Roman really fighting the Arab with his own old weapon 
 of cold steel, and 
 
 " Proved their doctrine orthodox 
 By apostolic (F) blows and knocks." 
 
 Of course, this annoyed these sons of Shem, annoyed them 
 
THE MIXIXG Ol'' THE TIJIBES: SOME .MORE ljlVING.ST(J.\E TYPES 
 
 \(ii;i; irr.MiiEE 
 
 .--Ei;\'A\'i' 
 
 I'U.STI' 
 
 11 X THE 
 
 ;e is I'Ds 
 
 1 1 ; 1 1 1 • X 1 1 
 
 ^IliLE." 
 
 lECACSK \() |,()\\|,:|; 
 
LIVINGSTONE'S "LOBSTER" ARABS 327 
 
 very mucli : he boasts of being homo unius libri, and does 
 not the Koran certify slavery as divine ? So it came to 
 pass that this African, who promised to be such a safe 
 follower of Islam in polygamy and worse, was rescued from 
 the Arab's grasp, the aivil power (don't forget it) doing 
 it aU. Therefore if Satan so cast out Satan, then surely 
 the Kin gdom of God has come very nigh unto this, the last 
 of the world's continents. God is thus seen enthroned 
 above all the turmoil, for men with such wildly divergent 
 intentions were overruled for blessiag to a vast continent. 
 The snug Islam accustomed to toleration in the East was 
 very much taken aback to find that it had overreached itself 
 in this unblushing slavery of Central Africa. Good it was 
 to see the sin of Shem exposed m the sunshine, Mohammed 
 with the mask torn ofE, a bloody sword in his hand, and not 
 a Crescent, but a skull and cross-bones on his flag of slavery. 
 In terse and stinging phrases, this Arab accuses the Christian 
 of " not playing the game " (ujunga) in thus settling the 
 slavery subject with shot and shell, forgetful of the fact 
 that the ground was of his own choosing. The Arab loved 
 the sword, and he has perished thereby, for against his 
 effete percussion-cap gun " the Kaffirs " of Europe out- 
 classed him with deadly breech-loaders. He would appeal 
 to Caesar's sword, and by that sword he was hewn to 
 pieces : 
 
 " Ah me, what perils do environ 
 
 The man that meddles with cold iron." 
 
 Nevertheless, even some of those good Algerian Peres 
 Blancs admit it is a half-mad, wholly desperate idea of 
 Rome trying to win Africa with a celibate priesthood — 
 Africa, a conjugal continent from Cape to Cairo ! There 
 is neither sense nor salvation in the idea of Lavigerie's 
 army of bachelors trying to combat the equally mad extreme 
 of the Arab harem, such a swing from zero to a hundred 
 being madness. All this in a land where your cook boy 
 seriously thinks of wedlock in his early teens. Listen to 
 the mocking Moslem words : " Allah sent Jesus and 
 gave Him the gospel, and put in the hearts of those that 
 follow Him kindness and pity, but monkery, they 
 invented it themselves." No wonder the Arabs insist 
 
328 LIVINGSTONE'S "LOBSTER" ARABS 
 
 that it was because the Cardinal up in Algeria could 
 not get even with, them theologically, he resolved like 
 Peter to cut ofi the ear that would not listen. How 
 a Romanist ever even attempted to contradict this 
 saying of Mohammed about their " inventing monkery 
 themselves " is not on record. On the road out east 
 towards Nyasa, you pass the good Romanist bishop, and 
 farther on encounter the humblest of Protestant Mission- 
 aries with only a plain '' Mr." tacked on to his name. 
 Yet, what a contrast between the warm little Mission 
 nest feathered by a kind wife, and the cold monastic 
 look of the Bishop's palace in the bush. If you take counsel 
 of Paul you wiU at once transfer the titles, for the Bishop 
 " must be the husband of one wife." So if a Bishop 
 " must " (?) have a palace, and if in the said palace he 
 " must " have one wife, then that plain Protestant is 
 the real bishop, and his plainer home the real palace. It is 
 obvious, at any rate, that only a Protestant of the very 
 simplest sort can make any headway agaiast these hawk- 
 eyed Arabs. Himself a man of one Book, the Moslem 
 strikes out against innovations, and only as you give chap- 
 ter and verse for it can you stand on holy writ, a " workman 
 that needeth not to be ashamed, rightly dividing the word 
 of Truth." Stabbing Rome on the matter of enforced 
 celibacy (" forbidding to marry " is a Pauline mark of 
 apostasy, remember), the Arabs also laugh in derision at 
 their priestcraft. Now at least, here they are as consistent 
 as Luther. More than a hundred millions of the human 
 race, and sadly lost to Christ though they are, yet do these 
 Arabs despise the mediation of any man in the matter 
 of his daily devotions. No man can eat his breakfast 
 for him and no man can say his prayers for him ! 
 
CHAPTER XXV 
 THE ADVERSE ARABS 
 
 Picture this short-cropped Living- 
 stone as engrossed in the activity of 
 a great enterprise, not the mere effu- 
 sion of a passing excitement. Thus you 
 catch the real point of view of the real 
 man — never forgetting Africa's safety 
 valve, the saving humour of things. 
 
"Fold up their tents like the Arabs, 
 And as silently steal away." 
 
 " A crow exclaimed : ' God is the Truth.' Then quoth one, ' The 
 dirt scraper has become a preacher.' " 
 
 Arabic proverb. 
 
 "The hunting dogs have scratched faces." 
 
 Arabic proverb. 
 
 " Thou Mndlest the fire and criest ' Fire.' " 
 
 Arabic proverb. 
 
CHAPTER XXV 
 THE ADVERSE ARABS 
 
 YET curiously it is just up here in the Luapula valley, 
 and right in the heart of his own much-scorned 
 " Wasenshi " (barbarians) the Arab knocks his 
 head against another of life's little ironies. They scorn 
 idol worship and twit the Luapula negroes with worshipping 
 a stone, but what is this stone if not a true lineal descen- 
 dant (perhaps ancestor !) of their own black one in the 
 Kabba ? Here in Ushiland behold the negro Kabba, 
 " Makumba," and the worship of this meteorite (?) is found 
 to ramify and unify the whole vast land. Far north in 
 Lubaland and far south among the feeders of the Zambezi, 
 there is no cut-throat potentate who does not quiver with 
 response at the very name of " Makumba," the heavenly 
 visitor, the meteorite or quartz that feU from " the clear 
 sky." (Compare Diana of Ephesus, the heavenly visitor 
 which " fell from Jupiter." This last phrase is reaUy a 
 translational error for " faUen from a clear sky." See 
 Eurip. Ifh. i. 977, 1384.) 
 
 Arab scorn, notwithstanding, there you have an ela- 
 borate ritual and priesthood all pathetically built on this 
 heavenly stone. See here, I repeat, one more of life's 
 sneers, for what is this Makiunba if not the foster-brother 
 of their own Kabba of Mecca 1 Year in, year out, millions 
 of the world of Islam cross sea and land to kiss that " fire- 
 stone " (?) that came down from Heaven, Yet they laugh 
 at our Central African for doing precisely the same thing, 
 and their sectarian compliments most surely come home to 
 roost. The fact is all this meteorite worship is a theme, 
 not for ribald laugh, but for the splash of tears. Where 
 is the good of explaining to him that asteroids are the chips 
 of an old planet and a meteoric stone only a chip of an 
 
 331 
 
382 THE ADVERSE ARABS 
 
 asteroid ? The whole thing, as touchingly explained by 
 the native, amounts desolately to this : their kissing with 
 the million kisses of the centuries of an authentic heavenly 
 stone is aU and only pathetically admissive of the fact that 
 no man hath ascended up into Heaven. When the worst 
 is said against it, that black austere stone is after all a 
 genuine heavenly meteor visitor. The mere dross and refuse 
 of Heaven though it be, it has been higher up than any of 
 them ! Hence the iron law that this is the true oracle of 
 the land : hither shall they all come to seek counsel from 
 the heavenly stone. 
 
 It is pathetic all this, for there was I, itinerant missionary, 
 merely completing the same neat geometric figure, same 
 triangle of idea. At the one apex behold the Arab boasting 
 of his heavenly stone. At the second, the negro with a 
 like authentic stone. And lastly here was I, tramp preacher 
 at my apex, also boasting of Christ the Heavenly Stone, 
 " the Stone cut out without hands," upon which He builds 
 His Church. Of course, Messrs. Arab and Negro spumed 
 my Stone. Nor was I surprised. Is it not the " Stone 
 of Stumbling " ? In a glance, one could see why Christ 
 is only a rock of ofEence : their stones were tangible, and 
 mine a metaphor. Memo for preachers : In Africa it is 
 better to suffer for speaking the truth than that the truth 
 should suffer by our silence. 
 
 My own matured opinion about this heavenly stone is 
 against the meteorite idea and for their hexagonal quartz, 
 " the stone cut out without hands " called by the oldest 
 name in Africa, Kizimba, the worshippers being called 
 Vakizimba. This I support with the following four reasons : 
 they (1) call this quartz " light " or bits broken off the sun ; 
 they (2) stupidly multiply instances (?) of this quartz 
 falling from the sky ; and (3) they clinch the whole thing 
 by pointing to these six straight hexagonal sides not of 
 earth because so geometrical, not of nature for there is no 
 straight line therein. Creatures of crooks and circles, 
 and more crooked than circular, they all centralise for 
 certitude on these clean-cut hexagons never carved by man 
 like an ugly wooden idol. Brainy-looking objects turned 
 out of some celestial workshop, " visitors from Heaven, yes, 
 
THE ADVERSE ARABS 333 
 
 picked up from the Mil-side, but only there because they 
 fell from the sky." Hence (4) all the northern chiefs 
 must have a " Eazimba " as their mark of kingship. 
 Hence all this juggling with the straight-as-a-die quartz, 
 " the stone cut out without hands," as oracle. Its very 
 geometric straightness of sides is perverted into crooked 
 quackery. 
 
 It is, in fact, this circle-on-the-brain African seeking 
 an escape, and seeing that possible escape symbolised in 
 these two hexagonal postulates : (1) see those six straight 
 equidistant sides ; (2) they must have come from the sky, 
 for mortal man never chiselled them into such geometric 
 shape. This is the reason why, in divination, they make 
 this aristocratic quartz the key-stone of it all. It is the 
 geometry of God they appeal to : " His ways are sawa, 
 i.e. equal," and so saying they seize on this token as 
 their link with the " Unknown who knows all." Thus it 
 surpasses a meteorite ia symbolistic suggestion, for the 
 mere height the meteor f eU is a miuor matter compared with 
 its haphazard crudeness of form. Not so, never so, the 
 deUcate finesse of their adorable hexagon. Thus even 
 when you pia him down to the certainty that quartz, like 
 sandstone or any other stone, is terrestrial, not celestial, 
 he swings round on you with the all- Africa belief that God 
 made them all, so they all came from above. 
 
 And here it is the Arab turns out to be an African fur 
 sang. He beats the black at divination. Was it not 
 Shereef, a drunken little Arab tailor, who plundered 
 Livingstone politely by divination ? Piously produced 
 his Koran and divined thereon that the Livingstone who 
 had disappeared into Manyema would never return, 
 could never return. For did not his Koran divina- 
 tion declare that he was dead? And, therefore, why 
 shoidd not he, the said Shereef, plunder his supplies 
 at Ujiji ? 
 
 Although, as I have said, the number of anti-negro 
 critics have been strangely and villainously augmented, 
 yet the Arab is not one. Bound to the African by the two 
 great bonds of polygamy and slavery, he is a witness not 
 at all poisoned by prejudice, albeit he so long bought the 
 
334 THE ADVERSE ARABS 
 
 negro as a two-legged animal. Take and try these six 
 nuts our Arab asks us to crack : 
 
 I 
 
 Was not the Prophet descended from an African woman 1 
 
 n 
 
 Were there not many mighty negroes like Wanshi whose exploits as 
 " Liberators " are celebrated in secular poetry 7 
 
 III 
 Were there not negro poets too ; yea, and was not Antarah one of them T 
 
 IV 
 Poems {Inshallah I), yea, prize poems ? 
 
 V 
 
 Nay {El kamdoo L'illahy), is not the SIst Chapter of the Koran inscribed to 
 a negro ? 
 
 VI 
 
 Yea ; was he not the great Lokman, the same known to the Greeks as ^ops ? 
 For does not jEsops = ^thiops and was he not praised in secular poetry as 
 " brimful of wisdom black as night " ? 
 
 These Arabs, then, although Sons of Belial, took him 
 all over the country and they warn us not to be cheap, 
 and boast a bundle of easy geographical error for the 
 Livingstone who never claimed it for himself. It is diflS.cult 
 to imagine any study that would prove more fascinatiug 
 in itself and more embarrassing to the rival nations of 
 Europe than this who-was-first ? history of exploration. 
 " History ! " it is called, forgetful of the fact that " history " 
 is only the old Greek word for " inquiry " and not a lot 
 of dogmatic drivel. Who, for instance, discovered the 
 Victoria Falls ? Certainly not Livingstone, although 
 nearly cent, per cent, of the R.G.S. believe it. Fair play, 
 please : sixteen years before ever Livingstone saw Victoria 
 Falls (i.e. 1832) a valiant Voortrekker saw them, Carel 
 Trichardt (eldest son of Louis T.). Not that he claimed 
 to be first there, for my old friend Silva Porto, greatest 
 of all African explorers, boasted to me at Belmonte in 
 '89 that they of Portugal saw them long before. 
 
 So, too, with Lake Mweru here. No doubt tradition 
 
THE ADVERSE ARABS 335 
 
 has hallowed the popular notion that Dr. Livingstone 
 discovered it, but wait a moment. He it is who is most 
 eager to inform us that seventy-two years before he, David 
 Livingstone, saw Mweru, Manoel Caetano Pereira came up 
 to Kazembe : then came Lacerda (" Charlie," the natives 
 called him), a native of Brazil, Doctor of Coimbra Uni- 
 versity, also Governor of Sena. Then followed Major 
 Monteiro ; aU Portuguese, all keen on the traditional ex- 
 ploration of their race, and long prior to the English. It 
 is Livingstone who frankly and finely tells us all this, just 
 as he admits that Lake Maravi (or Nyasa) appeared on old 
 Portuguese maps as early as 1546. So, too, with our 
 Far Interior, the Katanga. He tells of three Portuguese 
 arriving at Mushidi's (" Merosi," he calls him), Jao, 
 Domasiko and Domasho. They had " cut him out " ; 
 this was the Katanga he never reached, this the place the 
 women out east sang about blithely as they pounded flour 
 for the expedition : 
 
 " Oh the march of The Old Gent to Katanga I 
 Oh the march to Katanga, hack to Ujiji." 
 
 Did he regret, did he recriminate against his bad fortune 1 
 How covdd he, when his own recorded plans were all built 
 on James iv. 15 : " With help from above, I shall yet go 
 through Lubaland, see the underground excavations first, 
 then on to Katanga " ? The fact is we Britishers came 
 late on the scene of Mushidi's great Babylon. When I 
 was his secretary, Mushidi himself gave me the names of 
 quite a dozen who had preceded us, " cut us out," to use 
 Livingstone's chagrined phrase. Before Fred Amot of 
 undying memory reached '' the Garenganze," had not the 
 distinguished Capello and Ivens been there and taken 
 Mushidi's only photo ? Then, still before Arnot, came two 
 Germans, the leader that famous Reichard who had been 
 one of the most ardent promoters of the colonial move- 
 ment in Germany. A bit of his house is still standing 
 in the old Bunkeya capital. Thus it was we arrived to 
 find our passion for virgin soil flouted by these obvious 
 facts of prior pioneering. Hence Luanza, hence our push- 
 ing out to " &id and foimd " new untouched territory. 
 
336 THE ADVERSE ARABS 
 
 It is the old undignified story of Burton and Speke that 
 ended in death. There you had two men, a junior follow- 
 ing his senior as far as the discovery of Lake Tanganyika. 
 Burton is very much head of the expedition, Burton gets 
 the glory ; it is Ms Lake, his discovery. But now comes 
 the absurdly arrogant phase of this egotistic exploration. 
 Away goes Speke to the north, north where never Burton 
 trod. Here is virgin soil beyond Sir Richard's ken ; here 
 is a new great Lake, true source of the Nile, the quest of 
 the ages, and Speke's very own discovery, Victoria Nyanza. 
 And the result, degrading, disgusting result 1 A green- 
 eyed jealousy and reams of Burtonese print endorsing the 
 Socratic dictum that " envy is the filthy slime of the soul." 
 Meanwhile here you have the Arabs laughing at them 
 both and saying that they " carried in " the two travellers. 
 Then behind the Arab is the real fellow himself, genus 
 homo Africanus, winking out of the grass, every wink being 
 a hint that he the man on the spot, yes, he took them to 
 the spot. Thus it is old Ego in all lands is seen to smirk 
 and snigger behind an international mask of make-believe. 
 
 I mention this (it must be mentioned) because high 
 authorities trace Livingstone's ultimate desire and death 
 to his believing Burton's error instead of Speke's I've-been- 
 there data. I regretfully insist that the jealousy churning 
 and fermenting in the soul of Sir Richard did finally 
 eventuate in our Doctor's death. Who could juggle with 
 nouns, verbs, and adjectives like " Arabian Nights " 
 Burton ? And in the dust of their geographic brawl then 
 it was the devil got busy : England was deluded, Speke, 
 the true discoverer of the true source of the Nile, lost life 
 and knighthood, though Baker got his " Sir " for a lesser 
 find. And this Livingstone of ours, a man miles above 
 even imagining such trickery, " even Barnabas was 
 carried away " as Paul would put it. Deluded by Burton's 
 bombast, he, too, lost life and knighthood in seeking for 
 something already found so finely by a poor fellow who was 
 tricked out of his reward. Both dead for an error, error 
 bom of envy, envy bom of the devil, for did not dear, dirty 
 No. 1 do it all ? (" Dear," No. 1, I mean, for is he not 
 m^/self ? " Dirty," yes, for is he not self ?) 
 
THE ADVERSE ARABS 337 
 
 Small wonder the young African learning to write his 
 letters is astonished at the way we " poor white trash " 
 give ourselves so cheaply away in always writing the first 
 personal pronoun and none other as a capital "I." These 
 young blacks are quite agreed that this is " the nasty 
 nominative," so nasty are its tricks in caligraphy. The 
 whites, he thinks, might at least have done it more dis- 
 creetly. True, both black and white have tons of " ego " 
 rather tightly packed away under their skin. But why 
 should we allow this " I " to outwit all the other pronouns 
 by becoming the first person singular ; why should it not 
 be the second or third person if only to hookwink appear- 
 ances ? Then, nastier still, what does this brow-of-brass 
 pronoun dare to do ? S'il vous plait it conceives itself to 
 be such a capital feUow that it can only and always be 
 written as a pronoim with a capital, never mere lower-case 
 " i," but always arrogant " I." Yet even " we," also a 
 first person plural, even this aU-inclusive " we," a bigger 
 fellow, is not always written in capitals like absurd "I." 
 This " we " means many more people than this " I," yet 
 see the conceit of the latter, not merely talking tall but 
 stalking so tall among all the syllables ! 
 
 " Who planted the nutmeg tree on the Katanta ? " 
 There is a thrill in this surprise Livingstone got in the wilds 
 to find that somebody had passed on before who thought 
 of those who would foUow 1 This ia where some later 
 selfish pioneers failed : why plant a citron or an orange when 
 it would only first-fruit in five years 1 Why should others 
 eat what they could not ? It is only in the Millennium 
 where " one shall not plant and another eat." But this 
 is not the Millennium, and many a good fellow has planted 
 in faith only to leave the young saplings to a nonchalant 
 successor. Not always so, however. When Livingstone 
 was on the Zambezi he planted under the spray of the cata- 
 ract a hundred peach, apricot, and a quantity of coffee 
 seeds and the steady spray was surety enough that the seeds 
 germinated. But along came Livingstone's successors the 
 hippos, who in order to make up their modicum of five 
 bushels per night swallowed the young trees ! Did the 
 Messrs. Hippo surmise that the men who were coming 
 
 22 
 
338 THE ADVERSE ARABS 
 
 one day to eat that fruit were also out to eat their flesh ? 
 Therefore, no foreign fruit might mean no foreigner to eat the 
 same, therefore no hippo eaten ? Long after the sixteenth- 
 century Jesuits have passed away, hundreds of years after 
 the old churches were in ruins, the broken bell with its I.H.S. 
 rusted in the sun, their endless memorial will be those 
 groves of mangoes, limes, and tamarinds planted in the wild. 
 Thus it was Livingstone got a nasty little jag (a reminder 
 that after all he was not first along this trail) from that 
 anonymous act at the Katanta River long ago when 
 someone, sometime, planted the tree immortalised by 
 Livingstone. In two places in his small metallic notebook 
 he asks imperatively : " Who planted the nutmeg tree on the 
 Katanta ? " Had any of those seventy-five whites who 
 came up with Dr. Lacerda wandered over here seventy 
 years ago ? Or any of the long prior Arabs who as far 
 back as the fifteenth century had been installed at Eolwa 
 on the coast ? Echo answers Livingstone's wondering 
 " who ? " from the Africa that never kept a visitors' list. 
 It was : 
 
 " Men of the plain heroic breed. 
 The Bravely Dumb that did their deed 
 And scorned to blot it with a name." 
 
 The fact is, Livingstone's priority in all this is not of 
 time, but temperament : these men from Lisboa were real 
 noonday slavers carried in tipioas by slaves and the raw 
 natives know all about it. Certainly the reflex reward 
 has come back on them, for in some parts of Africa it is 
 common to refuse to denominate a Portuguese as a white 
 man : when the jingle of an approachmg hammock is 
 heard, the host asks his servant to spy out the land ahead 
 and find who the advancing visitor may be : " Is he a white 
 man?" "No." "A black man?" "No." "Who?" 
 " A Portuguese." Napoleon was right when he said that 
 " Africa begins at the Pyrenees," and the Lubans call them 
 the " Western Arabs," all unconscious of the good Moorish 
 substratum of history there is in the idea. 
 
 Beginning with a date so late as January 1909 and work- 
 ing back, how quickly the figures appal you. Try to 
 strike a grand total : if you address yourself in earnest to 
 
THE ADVERSE ARABS 339 
 
 the statistics of slavery in Africa, the figures mount up 
 passing strange. Put pictorially — and what a picture ! — ^it 
 has been reckoned that the negro victims would make a 
 double row round the earth at its Equator. Across morass, 
 fen and jimgle were they dragged out to the ocean, the 
 Eastern Arabs being long anterior to the Western Portu- 
 guese. On the west coast Paolo Diaz got a footing as 
 far back as 1576 and probably a dozen years later the real 
 trans-Atlantic export slavery began. Even the Protestant 
 Dutch who captured Loanda in 1641 had no higher ideal 
 than to work their American possessions with negro slave 
 labour. Seven years later they were expelled, but by 
 whom ? An historian seriously informs us that '' the 
 inhabitants of Rio de Janeiro largely contributed to the 
 expedition as they saw how hurtful to their interests the 
 loss of Angola would be from the failure in the supply 
 of slave labour." After his long residence in the country 
 we can now listen to Joachim John Monteiro who worked 
 the copper deposits of BengueUa. The leap from 1576 
 to 1875 is a long one, but aU that time slavery was raging. 
 " The number of slaves," says Monteiro, " shipped in An- 
 gola cotdd not have been far short of 100,000 per annum. 
 I was told by some of the oldest inhabitants that to see 
 as many as ten to twelve vessels loading at a time 
 was a common occurrence. I have seen as many as 
 1,000 slaves arrive in one caravan from the interior, 
 principally from Bihe. . . . Average price of a fuU-grown 
 man or woman was about £3 in cloth or other goods and 
 as low as 55. for a little nigger." ^ 
 
 EinaUy, who can fill the gap of years between 1875 and 
 Mr. Swan's data of 1909 ? The law of the equality of 
 ratios sxirely demands that in these intervening years the 
 increasing demand extorted from Africa an increasing 
 supply. Yet aU this not far from the spot where, centuries 
 ago, Diego Cam was welcomed with open arms by the 
 natives and escorted in triumph to the Capital of the Congo 
 Kingdom. The old chronicler assures us that 100,000 
 
 1 The Spectator as late as July 19, 1920, quoted at length their own Lisbon 
 " Tempo " to prove that slavery was still in fuU blast in Portuguese Africa. 
 Hence my pertinacity on this threadbare story. 
 
340 THE ADVERSE ARABS 
 
 natives became Christians " in a trice," including tlie King, 
 who, accepting the baptismal name of John, also changed 
 the name of his city to San Salvador. Alas, whether it 
 be the city of Mansoiil or the city of mud huts, to alter 
 the name is not equivalent to altering the nature : can the 
 Ethiopian change his skin ? 
 
 And, remember, Mr. Pharisee (some later, some earlier !), 
 we were all in it, very much in it. Out on the west coast 
 you need not for a single moment of time blame the 
 Portuguese only ; Africa has an ugly way of levelling 
 European nationalities : where, when or how was virtue 
 ever nationalised 1 Dutch, French, Flemish, Spanish, 
 Portuguese and English, they are all alike labelled " Ovin- 
 dele " by the negro, the old west-coast law of lawlessness 
 being : 
 
 " To do as all men ever would — 
 Ovm no man master but their mood," 
 
 Only a few years ago a British Consul had to accuse of 
 wholesale murder one " John Scott, a merchant trading 
 at Ponta da Lenha, and a British subject." It was the old 
 dark story of another alleged attempt. A slave boy is 
 arrested and tortured until he, "under the influence of great 
 agony," accused first one of his fellow-slaves and after- 
 wards several others of participation in the offence. The 
 first victim, who at the time of the offence was many miles 
 away, was captured and, I quote the Blue Book, without 
 being interrogated at all was bound hand and foot, taken 
 out in a canoe into the middle of the stream and after- 
 wards drowned. The rest shared the same fate, twelve being 
 taken up river to Boma (of all places !) by the said John 
 Scott, who caused eleven of them, men, women and children, 
 to be " all attached to an iron chain and drowned in the 
 river in front of his house." The same John Scott, this, 
 who in the early days acted as agent for the Missionaries 
 and tried once to get a £40 a/c paid twice. Little room 
 have the good missionaries to be surprised at the doubling 
 of a debt by the very ruffian who for a conjectural crime 
 of arson could extort, not mere money, but the blood of 
 man, woman and babe. The superintendent and soul 
 of this massacre, the commercial agent of a Mission ! 
 
THE ADVERSE ARABS 341 
 
 " In all," the Britislx Consul reported, " I am assured that 
 about thirty-two unfortunate, helpless beings were mur- 
 dered," and he added, " I am also informed that the murder 
 of one or more slaves by white men is almost a daily 
 occurrence, and that the torture of the thumb-screw was 
 applied to many more besides the boy first alluded to, and 
 in some instances it was so severe that the bones of the 
 fingers of these most unfortunate people were completely 
 crushed before they would implicate others ; and beyond 
 a doubt, under their excruciating agony they accused many 
 innocent people, for children of tender years were included 
 and not spared." 
 
CHAPTER XXVI 
 THE SPELL-BOUND LIVINGSTONE 
 
 These technical pages are dedicated 
 to the fulfilment of Livingstone's dying 
 desire : a seeking and a finding, even 
 in Africa, of some divine data that 
 dovetails into to. fiifSkia. " This 
 spell-bounds me," said he. 
 
Livingstone's doctrine of the Bible : " This is doubly the book of 
 God and the God of Books, because it unfolds God to man and man to 
 himself." 
 
 Also : In any land there is the same old international sing-song 
 of conscience : "I know and God knows, and God knows that I 
 know that He knows." 
 
 Also : " The O.T. opens with man made in the image of 
 God, and the N.T. opens with God in the image of man." 
 
CHAPTER XXVI 
 THE SPELL-BOUND LIVINGSTONE 
 
 THE furtlier we squeeze south the more the " Inger- 
 esa " gossip squeezes out of the old men who look 
 like tortoises. Each camp has its new contri- 
 bution, and many an old waster with an edge on his tongue 
 makes no efiort to eliminate the news that Livingstone was 
 " a God's Book Man " (wa nkalata ya kwa Leza). But the 
 man who marks his Bible is likewise marked thereby : 
 " I read the Bible," says the Doctor, " four times over 
 when in Manyema." In his reading he saw his leading : 
 Christ did not trick his David Livingstone into aU these 
 trials, for unto such was he called. Those four readings of 
 the whole Bible in Manyema-land had opened his eyes. Al- 
 though he came out at Ujiji a " living skeleton," yet was 
 the inward man renewed day by day. Like Paul's breaking- 
 up ship that cast four anchors from the stern, so this 
 " Living skeleton " initialed " D. L." got his four anchors 
 out of his " four " readings of the Bible when cut ofE from 
 the world's libraries. His Newman, Carlyle, Arnold, were 
 ant-eaten hundreds of mUes away, good thing too. Has 
 not G. K. C. said, " If Newman seemed suddenly to fly 
 into a temper, Carlyle seemed never to fly out of one. But 
 Arnold kept a smile of heart-broken forbearance, as of the 
 teacher in an idiot school, that was enormously insulting " ? 
 All this is far less an interruption than a continuity when 
 you see his Last Journals sprinkled with soul-saving Bible 
 in dozens of pages. I press this point of his reading the 
 Bible four times through in Manyema, because this was 
 the most putrid place in all Africa. This was where he 
 saw " the measureless atrocity " on July 15, 1871, giving 
 him the impression of " being in hell." Thus it was he 
 wrote the most tremendous thing in the exegesis of the 
 
 345 
 
346 THE SPELL-BOUND LIVINGSTONE 
 
 soul : " The Bible gathers wonderful interest from the 
 circumstances in which it is read." This confession sweeps 
 us into a new sphere of spiritual vision with new horizons, 
 new possibilities. Be it sick-bed or sick land, then it 
 is your text gets its true context. Often the smug, 
 soft-cushion reading is more mere pretext than text or 
 context. 
 
 And as the reading so the writing. How often does the 
 homeland remember that nearly all the New Testament 
 was written from the Foreign Mission field ? It was when 
 " Satan hindered " Paul to go to Thessalonica, then it 
 was he, right away, sat down and wrote Epistles No. I 
 and II, read ultimately by many more millions than that 
 old Greek city could ever contain. John saw heaven 
 opened on his island of exile. '' The heavenly calling " 
 was revealed to Paul in his cold, clammy Roman prison. 
 Well might we modify Livingstone's phrasing : " The Bible 
 gathers wonderful interest from the circumstances in which 
 it was (not ' read ' but) written." 
 
 From the standpoint of the superficial truculencies of 
 modern literature I am afraid I am spoiling my picture 
 by over-emphasising Livingstone's Bible study. Did not 
 he himself say, " My views of what is missionary duty are 
 not so contracted as those whose ideal of a missionary is 
 that of a dumpy sort of man with a Bible imder his arm " ? 
 No, my point is that long ago he had severed his official 
 connection with any sort of Missionary Society, and it is 
 the non-lapsed Livingstone who lives The Life and talks 
 The Talk. It was not a case of " cash-down Christian- 
 ity " ; that Consul's cap he wore, far from making any 
 difference made all the difference. To the burning end 
 it was the same old song : "I am a missionary, heart and 
 soul. God had an only Son and He was a Missionary and 
 a Physician. A poor, poor imitation I am or wish to be. 
 In this service I hope to live, in it I wish to die." 
 
 But he never lost his balance ; was no shrieker, and pro- 
 bably the sum of the whole Livingstone philosophy was 
 that to " put ofi the old man " you need not put on the old 
 woman. Did not Sydney Smith divide mankind derisively 
 into three sexes — ^men, women, and curates ? 
 
THE SPELL-BOUND LIVINGSTONE 347 
 
 Small wonder, then, tte Livingstone so helped by the 
 Bible wanted in turn to help the Bible. 
 
 " I pray the good Lord of all," says he, " to favour me 
 so as to allow me to discover anything to confirm the 
 precious old documents (to, /SiySXia), the Scriptures of 
 truth : may He permit me to bring it to light and give me 
 wisdom to make a proper use of it." 
 
 Then he contrasts the glory of mere geography with 
 this more glorious God-graphy : " Some," says he, " seem 
 to feel that their own importance in the community is 
 enhanced by an imaginary connection with a discovery or 
 discoverer of the Nile sources, and are only too happy to 
 figure, if only in a minor part, as theoretical discoverers, a 
 theoretical discovery being a contradiction in terms ! " 
 Then he returns to it, his presentiment of death having been 
 lost in the desire to dig out of this African darkness some 
 seal of certitude that God's Word was truth, not trash. This 
 would be all the reward he wanted : " I had," he writes, 
 " a strong presentiment during the first three years that 
 I should never live through the enterprise, but it weakened 
 as I came near to the end of the journey, and an eager 
 desire to discover any evidence of the great Moses having 
 visited these parts bound me, sfell-bound me, I may say, 
 for if I coidd bring to light anything to confiirm the Sacred 
 Oracles, I should not grudge one whit all the labour 
 expended." 
 
 This mention of Moses will be misimderstood unless the 
 reader notes that these Arabs around us are always talking 
 about the supposed journeys of Moses through Central 
 Africa. They express surprise when you demur, and deplore 
 your ignorance of such easy data. Really they may not 
 be far wrong. I think the Bible must love to be translated 
 into these languages, it is all in their own type of talk. 
 Across the river they seem soaked in Bible, yet never 
 saw or knew a copy in their life. As though to minimise 
 the monstrous fact of cannibalism, Lubaland is full of such 
 hints as to its link with a Palestine they never heard of. 
 To translate the numerous names, you could easily do so 
 in the exact terms of Holy Writ, and this in spite of the 
 all-encompassing gloom. The river crossing here is literally 
 
348 THE SPELL-BOUND LIVINGSTONE 
 
 translated Bethdbara (in equivalent language, of course) and 
 the keeper thereof is called Jonah, i.e. the dove. Another 
 chocolate-coloured negro here is called Gideon, or the 
 breaker ; another, Ezra, the helper ; and another, Samson, 
 or the sun. The very mountain with its rounded knob is 
 translated Calvary, or the skull-like place, and this is 
 verifiable from fact that the human head is called " the 
 mountain of wisdom." A man rescued from the crocodiles 
 is called Moses, or the drawn-out-one.' 
 
 Nor would I care to be local cannibal Postmaster over 
 there. If that official had the puzzle to deliver letters in 
 these parts, he would be nonplussed by the length of negro 
 names. Curiously reminiscent these of the same mouthful 
 given the members of " Barebones " Parliament ; among 
 wild wasters (forsooth!) how surprising, to hear a man 
 puritanically called " Mr. Fear-God-but-never-fear-man." 
 Here is his neighbour, too, boasting the pious cognomen, 
 " Mr. Tell-God-that-only-is-left." So, too, any foggy old 
 man-eater is called " Mr. The-Friend-of-God," the idea 
 being that his mere lengthened tenure of years is a proof 
 that he is far into God's favour. Secular names are, 
 of course, more common ; one man before me boasting 
 the ugly puff : " Mr. Owl-a-bad-one-but-there-are-just-as- 
 bad-in-the-town." Again, here is " Mr. Plenty-of-names- 
 but-not-plenty-of-riches," who, by the by, is the bosom 
 friend of " Mr. He-is-his-own-enemy-not-his-neighbour's." 
 To ask them what it all means, this spinning out of long 
 names, is to be reminded for the thousandth time that mere 
 " Smith " or " Brown " or " Jones " is no name at aU in 
 the Bantu sense of the word. It is a label, not a name in 
 the conventional caimibal sense. For, unless the name 
 be accurately photographic of the man's nature, then 
 obviously it is not his name at aU, but descriptive of either 
 somebody or nobody else. 
 
 Of course, the fellow got a baby-name at birth, but this 
 negro is at bottom a bold Baptist. Nomen omen is his 
 motto, and he rebels against the idea of anyone, even his 
 " mama " (yes, the same old word), knowing his hidden 
 
 '■ But see the argument from Ethnology at p. 152, ante, which may explain 
 where all this comes from. 
 
THE SPELL-BOUND LIVINGSTONE 349 
 
 heart or nature. So when he grows up he spurns that old 
 baby-name he got from outsiders : does not name equate 
 nature ? and the latter being iaside, he alone knows and 
 names that nature lurking deep down in his being. The 
 dearest kinsman is only a rank, a frank outsider where 
 this intense inside business is involved of naming a la nature. 
 Did not Tennyson call it " the word that is the symbol of 
 myself " ? Why should not your nomen fit all the facts 
 of your omen ? This is the good God's way at any rate, 
 for The Day is coming when He shall strip us of all external 
 make-believe, and then we get a new name that no man 
 hnows save him who has the same. For what man knoweth 
 the things of a man save the spirit of a man that is in man ? 
 
 So, too, farther down the same Lualaba, at a town be- 
 reaved of its time-honoured chief Ngwena, by name and 
 nature. Entering the place, I found a vision of chaos 
 and inertia consequent on the death of such a busy ruler, 
 the town a rioting bedlam. " Ah, yes," spoke up an Elder, 
 " a city is a Body of which the King is Head ; cut ofi 
 the head and the body is dead." How precisely Paidiae 
 all this is : the Church of Christ being both a City and a 
 Body. Their very word for " body," moreover, only makes 
 assurance doubly sure as to Pauliue analogy. For the 
 body means " the two-in-one thing " {muvidi), the idea 
 being that a human being is a unit made up of two perfect 
 halves : two eyes, ears, arms, legs, etc. Identically 
 Biblical, this, of course, for does not Paul say of " the body 
 of Christ " that of twain he made one ? 
 
 Take the Fisher Chiefs, too, and listen to their metaphor 
 for the mixed character of their subjects : " Oh, we must 
 take what we get ; a Kingdom is a Bukonde, i.e. net, and 
 all sorts of fish are gathered in it." So, too, with the 
 dozens of Chiefs who call themselves after trees. What 
 is their idea if not the very Biblical one that every subject 
 in the Kingdom is only a branch or a trunk in the King- 
 trunk ? How like ' ' I am the vine, and ye are the branches. ' ' 
 
 Take again this common instance of a widowed woman : 
 All such, in their loneliness, are called " the spouse of God " 
 {Muka Leza), because their himian helpmeet is no more. 
 How like lonely widowed Israel being comforted with 
 
350 THE SPELL-BOUND LIVINGSTONE 
 
 the words : " Thy Maker is thy husband." Surely all 
 this means that you can really get to close quarters with the 
 Bible, here at the world's end ? But this opens a large 
 subject, too large for a mere chapter. 
 
 Take, however, three final Mosaic facts. I find, for in- 
 stance, an easy and obvious link in circumcision ; verbal, 
 I mean, not anthropological. For why should the word 
 for " law " (mukanda) be the same as " circumcision " ? 
 Again : mere straw indicating the current, this Hebrew 
 link is seconded in the word for " slavery " (ntundu). 
 Here again you wonder why this very word should also 
 mean " the bored ear." Was not the boring of the ear 
 the fixed mark of Mosaic servitude ? 
 
 But greater and grander link still is the root-name for 
 God. Here surely this subject that " speU-bound " 
 Livingstone before his death ends on the crescendo. I 
 mean, not merely that these natives have the genuine idea of 
 God, but that they have the identical name that Moses used. 
 
 Not Hebrew only, but Greek links they have, for is not 
 
 the whole world kiu ? If you caU the chief K you can 
 
 easily prove a Grecian link with Lubaland. Asking this 
 cheery chief the sum- total of his ideas on a model Kingdom, 
 says he : " Oh ! Thou of the Boots, the bow needs the arrows 
 and the arrows need the bow, and a Kingdom divided 
 against itself cannot stand." Pausing in the problem, 
 he continues : " This death ! death ! cry in the land is 
 madness, for porridge is sweet [i.e. life is precious]. Besides, 
 we are all such spicy food for worms [lit. teeth- watery food] 
 that we should live for life, not for death. Don't boast 
 of your strength, for the world is split into two bands 
 only : one the band of the blind and the other the band of 
 
 the lame. Now," continued K , " this teaches us 
 
 good-brotherhood, for what would a blind and lame man do 
 in a burning town ? " (At this point our Luban gives such 
 a literally Greek answer to the query, that I will juxtapose a 
 quotation from Lord Neave's Greek Anthology by way of 
 contrast.) 
 
 K the Luban 
 
 " Fleeing from a burning town, as I shall be thy legs — ^so shall we 
 wouldnotMr, Blind say to Mr, Lame : escape this burning town and teach 
 
THE SPELL-BOUND LIVINGSTONE 351 
 
 • As we are so mutually dependent on all men what full fellowship means ' ? " 
 each other, be thou mine eyes even 
 
 Lord Neave's Anthology 
 Deficient one in limbs and one in eyes, 
 Each with the other's help his want supplies, 
 The blind man lifts the lame man on his back. 
 And by the other's words directs his track : 
 Wholesome necessity this lesson taught, 
 By mutual pity mutual help was brought. 
 
 This ciirious coincidence of Greek analogy is as notMng 
 compared with the fact that here in this parable of a " lame 
 
 and blind " fellowship you have the picture of K 's 
 
 own life : the whole thing looks like this chief reading out 
 the programme of his future. For, remember, this David, 
 
 to wit K , has his negro Jonathan, to wit M ; both 
 
 chiefs ripe for perdition, as black and bad morally as they 
 
 make them. Now, this friend of K yielded to Christ 
 
 for evermore, salvation finding him in bodily sorrow. Once 
 as fleet as a deer, a wounded foot brought him very low, and 
 day by day my wife worked for a cure. The cure came and 
 
 so did salvation, but M became the literally lame man 
 
 of his friend's parable. Now, if Jonathan, alias M , has 
 
 no legs he certainly has eyes, both sight of body and sight 
 
 of soul ; alas, his old friend David, alias K , has legs 
 
 and to spare, but he is still blind to God and grace abound- 
 ing. Yet it all turns out well, and the Greco-Luban 
 parable becomes the true programme of their double 
 
 escape, K , too, becomes a Christian. The lame 
 
 man in the burning town, saying to his blind friend : 
 " Let us flee ; you will be my legs and I will be your eyes, 
 so let us teach the world fellowship ! " Moral : If lame 
 Smith laughs at Jones's blindness, Jones can retort on 
 Smith's lameness : but life is made up of sterner stufi, 
 therefore why not combine as Messrs. Smith and Jones 
 Limited to fight life's common enemy ? 
 
 But all this analogy goes deeper. Here is a snatch of 
 pure Greek philosophy proving the cannibal link with 
 Eleusis, The verb " to be," " to exist," is Di, and the noun 
 for an egg is Di, and if you ask the reason why, they will 
 start you on their old " will-o'-the-wisp " chase round the 
 circularity of existence. Thus : " Which was first, first 
 
352 THE SPELL-BOUND LIVINGSTONE 
 
 egg or first fowl, first acorn or first oak ? " Quizzing 
 the heiropliant as to why an egg should be the chosen type 
 of endless existence, he said smartly that the egg symbol 
 was a double one and therefore perfect. For (1) the ideal 
 circularity contained in an egg endlessly begetting a fowl 
 that in turn gave another egg was a symbol of (2) the actual 
 rotundity of the egg-shell, which has no break in it. 
 
 Or again, take this pure Pythagorean idea embedded ia 
 the dry grammar of their language. The great root for 
 " evil '' is the trans- African syllable Vi (as in buvi) just as the 
 great plural prefix is precisely the same Vi = plurality = 
 evil. Now, what is this if not the oldest idea on earth that 
 goodness = unity, just as badness = disintegration, plural- 
 ity ? Nevertheless, mere etymology is so notoriously 
 conjectural that probably the surest proof of a Luban 
 being a Hegelian can be found in the serious structure 
 of his grammar. This you can check even in England by 
 looking at any atlas, where many a long streaky African 
 river is seen to begin with Lu (e.g. Lualaba, Lufixa, etc.). 
 Well, you have only to push your investigations from this 
 starting-point of Lu = long, thin, streakiness, to find that 
 by going too far east you reach west : the paradox swings 
 full circle, and now you find clustering under the same Lu 
 prefix all short stubby objects like a bullet {Lusase) or 
 Lushama = a pea ! So, too, with the notorious trans- 
 African prefix Ka. Here again, a frank outsider can check 
 the data by noting that many great Kings have Ka titles, 
 Kazembe, Kasongo, etc. Yet this also is only insolent 
 paradox, for what is the notorious diminutive prefix 
 but this same Ka 1 Here then in an intricate, because 
 structural sense, the curious contradiction of the Bantu 
 is proved. That is to say, not by mere whim or caprice 
 does he contradict himself, but foundationaUy it is so. 
 There, constellating under a common prefix you have sharp 
 cleavage of idea : the long thing is the short thing, even as 
 the hard thing is the soft. A black " bull " this, that puts 
 to blush the worst Irishism ever perpetrated. 
 
 The fact is, if Egypt is the door of Africa, then is it 
 tolerably clear that in these Luban mysteries and philo- 
 Bophies we see the African's brain whirling round the 
 
THE SPELL-BOUND LIVINGSTONE 353 
 
 Osiris cycle of nature, and seeing unity in tlie constant 
 dissolution and reorganisation going on all around. Tlie 
 very ears of com of the Isis statues prove this, for the 
 cannibals sing a lovely " resurrection " chant in honour 
 of the com : " Ah ! it went away into the cold dark loam 
 a tiny seed, but when it came again, oh, it came gorgeously 
 dressed ! " Finally, to carp that because they are cannibals 
 aU this cannot be, is to forget that Herodotus mentioned 
 this very man-eating as a certain characteristic of the 
 Egyptian orgies. Voild tovi ! 
 
 Not entirely without reason, therefore, have aU the Afri- 
 can grammars gone smash on this rock of paradox. We 
 are all too British, all too full of common sense to dare 
 bmld our books on clear unclouded contradiction. How 
 can the negative be the affirmative ? The only man who 
 ever saw this was Diaz, a fine old African grammarian, 
 nearly as far back as the days of Charles I. He puts it 
 quaintly : " No-man may signify hoik ' less than a man ' 
 and ' more than man.' " Here, then, was the long-found 
 key that we modems despised to our detriment and lin- 
 guistic disgrace. Paradox, yes, but what is paradox if 
 not Truth standing on its head to attract attention ? 
 The African's circiilar hut is the seed-plot of his philosophy 
 of circularity. These funny folks in a meeting first crowd 
 in a circle, then, in true sarcastic sequence, they think and 
 talk in a circle. The eye is circle No. 1, and looking out on 
 the landscape of life it is a case of like eye like landscape, 
 360° every time. He rambles round in a circle of speech in 
 the same way as he sees the circularity of seasons in Nature 
 or the day-and-night cycle of sleeping and waking. His 
 carved stools and utensils are aU circular and he borrows 
 from Nature the idea that rotundity is the only safe shape 
 of things. 
 
 More " mysteries," in fact, literal Greek ones. In its 
 deep penetralia, it seems this tribe is a gross unit of Free- 
 masonry, with initiation of the various dark degrees. 
 The Londe is their club-house, a long low-roofed shed the 
 scene of their revels, fees of initiation are considerable, and 
 they facetiously flourish that old scarecrow, death, the 
 penalty of divulgence. This, they declare, is their only 
 23 
 
354 THE SPELL-BOUND LIVINGSTONE 
 
 true linTf with tlie pitiless past, and it comes straight down 
 from God as their black Bible. No nation, they say, has 
 a monopoly of Him, but as we English dwell away out on 
 the skyline we are consequently nearer God geographically. 
 Nevertheless they all aver that each race has its Bible, a 
 curiously cunning hit in the dark this. For, undoubtedly, 
 as you penetrate the maze, the whole machinery of the 
 cult is undeniably Eleusiuian in character, and does not 
 Paul call his Gospel a jxva-TTJpiov precisely as the I/uban 
 calls it his " black Bible " ? Moreover, so cunningly 
 devised is the labyrinth of initiation that of any Judas who 
 betrays their secret they merely say indifferently, " Oh ! 
 Mr. Break-the-fellowship-only-breaks-his-own-fellowship." 
 
 An excellent shot this at apostates of any sort, whether 
 pagan or Christian. Asked why they do not fulfil the club 
 threat, and kill a Judas of this sort, they retort that he 
 will kiU himself ! The treadmill of initiation is intention- 
 ally long and exasperating, this tedious time being supposed 
 to overawe the acolyte with the supposed sanctity of the 
 freemasonry. Is this the cradle in which was nursed the 
 idea of a long Christian catechumenate ? Thus, at long last, 
 he wriggles into the sacred circle of the Eleusinian Election, 
 " Suvula " or anointing being the goal. This is called his 
 " new birth," and the new man must speak a new lingo, 
 the Vamhudie all having a secret vocabulary of brilliantly 
 poetic ideas. Thus even ordinary universals hke food, 
 water, fire, can only be named with some dazzling title 
 of honour, the idea being that everything has now become 
 new ; water, for instance, is called " the golden gleam of 
 light." There is, besides, the sacred feast at which the 
 bread of fraternity is eaten, and this banquet finally tails 
 off in a rough musical drama the chief feature of which is 
 the really clever hons mots. Generally, stinging epigrams 
 these, they hint at local abuses, the nasty nip of the saying 
 beiag all the nastier because hidden subtly in the kernel of 
 thought. Thus a mere grammarian can parse these 
 perfectly and still be befogged, the latent meaning being 
 lost in parable. 
 
 But as I have suggested, and now repeat, the crown of aU 
 this initiation is The Anointing. Those dragging days of 
 
UOAlI'MiKOWX 
 lA'AS'/.A I.-- A 
 
 .-iri'lJKS: THIS SIMI'I.K " li K !•: 1) \\( > I : K " AT 
 'l"i'|-H'AI, AtlAPTATIUX T(J IJK'AI, l(l\|liri()N> 
 Oh I, (HAL LAKE M.tTKTK. 
 
THE SPELL-BOUND LIVINGSTONE 355 
 
 delay when The Doctrine was distilled into Ids soul drop 
 by drop, those were a mere hyphen and connecting link : 
 now it is, in this Anointitig, he is loosed from his bonds, 
 the hierophant with pompous pride declaring him a freeman 
 whom " The Truth " makes free. It is in one phrase, 
 however, that aU the subtlety of this devil's counterfeit 
 comes out, the whole standiiag stripped to its essential 
 value ; a phrase this, word for word, Bible Greek. This 
 final formula runs : Ye have now an anointing {Ku suvula) 
 and needeth not that anyone teach you. Step by step, and 
 line upon line, it is all over at last, and there he stands 
 glistening in oil, his anointing a pledge that he needeth not 
 anyone to teach him now. Contrast this devil's own tread- 
 mill arrangement with God's sudden illumination of the 
 soul in conversion, one vivid, electrifying flash of faith 
 versus this long, laboured, ante-anointing process, the 
 priest's fees, too, enormous. 
 
 But many of these chiefs are doubly due their designa- 
 tion : chief of their country and chief of sinners. Be sure 
 of it, 99 Lubans out of every 100 would have let me preach 
 away with insouciance, but the great Nyemba Kunda (whose 
 other name means " The Smoking Firebrand ") is the 100th, 
 and must boldly strike back. Under soft disguises and 
 calculated euphemisms, the ordinary run of natives twist 
 the " Nay " of their hearts into the " Yea " of their lying 
 lips ; not so this magnificent rebel, N. K., mentioned by 
 Livingstone.^ In parting, I laid down the law to him that 
 my pocket Bible was by no means such a foreign book after 
 all, and to prove my point I promised, there and then, to 
 show him his own name down in black-and-white in the Book 
 — yes, he, the " Smoking Firebrand " actually " tattooed " 
 (sic), written down in the Bible. This astounding man was 
 astounded and a nightmare pause ensued as I fumbled 
 (shame !) not too successfully among Isaiah's 66 chapters, 
 like a needle in a haystack, seeking for the weU-known 
 " Smoking Firebrand " verse. At last, putting finger on it 
 dramatically, he poked his nose right on the printed page, 
 
 * This is the same chieftainship barred by Livingstone, and exceptionally 
 mapped by him as " non-visitable," being too menacing. We have now a 
 Bible School at his place. 
 
356 THE SPELL-BOUND LIVINGSTONE 
 
 the cMef's brow wrinkled in the intensity of concentra- 
 tion. 
 
 He who could not speU a line took it all on trust, and 
 believed his name-therefore-his-nature down in Isaiah vii. 
 So this was the foreign book he had waved ofi with disdain ; 
 this the astounding Book that has now become a real Luban 
 Directory, his own name and nature down in it ! Yes, 
 a devil's-own-firebrand sending the country up in smoke 
 with his raiding parties. But his surprises are only 
 beginning, and now it is they get into grips, good Bible 
 and bad man : " Smoking Firebrand ? " said he, " yes, 
 that's my name, and it's tattooed in The Book, but what 
 else does it say about The Smoking Firebrand ? " Quick 
 as thought, I turned to the good news about brands 
 " plucked from the bumirig," and gave him the straight 
 Gospel, a " smoking firebrand " soon to be a burning one 
 but for the sharp, snatching intervention of Grace, " brands 
 plucked from the burning." Then he wanted more about 
 this precious plucking process : " What next 1 " " Oh, 
 that's very simple," said I. " When you have been plucked 
 out of the fire yourself, then you must obey the command : 
 ' Others save, pulling them out of the fire.' " So you see 
 how their very penchant for names turns out to be so much 
 shot and shell for the Gospel guns, and his old name may 
 iave been the means of giving him a new nature. 
 
 One old lady at once reminds us that the Queen of Sheba 
 came out of Central Africa, by a curious word she uses. 
 It is an hiatus-adjective, most wonderful adjective ever 
 qualifying noun and means " the half has not yet been told." 
 It is spelt k-u-t-i, and when she joins this adjective to such 
 great noun phrases as " God's wisdom," " God's love," or 
 " God's power," it means, respectively, " the-half-hath-not 
 been-told " wisdom or " the-half-hath-not-been-told " love, 
 or power. Produce such a word if you can, and if you dare, 
 from cultured EngUsh. Yet this is in a language that 
 never had a book, never had a school. And if you listen a 
 little longer this woman, who is only a child of impulse 
 and sunshine, can teach you deep doctrine. Little does 
 she guess how Oxford would thank her for one flash of 
 light she can shed on an old Greek problem. Again it is 
 
THE SPELL-BOUND LIVINGSTONE 357 
 
 an adjective, none other ttan " everlasting." This par- 
 ticle is p-e and means pure perpetuity for ever and a day. 
 Yet the problem is as inscrutable in Greek as Chivemba 
 because this small word for a big idea comes from the verb 
 " to breathe," i.e. p-e, everlasting, from pe-ma," to breathe." 
 I say Greek problem as well as African, for as far back as 
 Aristotle and down the intervening years here you have 
 this smile-provoking philological puzzle ; why, oh, why is 
 it that the word for " age " or " eternity " should come 
 from the verb " to breathe " (aion = eternity from aemi 
 = to breathe) ? What so brief as the breath we breathe ? 
 "What so long as interminable eternity ? Then why, a 
 thousand times why, should the long and the short come 
 from the root " to breathe " ? No answer comes from 
 Oxford or Harvard, " why ? " merely echoes " why ? " 
 Then comes the impossible ; this absurd Africa steps into 
 the ring, non-academic, non-everything Africa. Yes ; 
 Africa has easily got the solution, for here is an old woman 
 who opens the long-shut lock. " Puzzle ? " says she, 
 " there is no puzzle at all in ' everlasting ' being the same 
 as ' to breathe,' for sleeping or waking this is what we are 
 ever and always doing, breathing, always breathing. 
 Sometimes we eat not, sometimes we drink not, but breathe, 
 we always breathe. Naturally and normally we ceaselessly 
 do this. We rest from working, we rest from walking, but 
 inexorably we never rest from breathing. Why, then, if 
 we are so everlastingly at this breathing business should 
 there be any puzzle in the word ' everlasting ' being from 
 the verb ' to breathe ' ? " Thus spake my friend, Mrs, 
 African, with a charming imperiousness that was quite 
 irresistible. 
 
CHAPTER XXVII 
 EPILOGUE : DEAD MEN'S SHOES 
 
 First, last, ani all the time, these 
 letters fasten -firmly on Livingstone's 
 cardinal -postulate that, here in the old 
 Gospel, you have the master project of 
 the Mind of God. Ergo, may that 
 master project master us as it did him. 
 
" I have always found that the art of successful travel consisted in 
 talcing as few impedimenta as possible, and not forgetting to carry my 
 wits about me." 
 
 Livingstone. 
 
 " In the evening we encamped beside a little rill, and made our 
 shelters, but had so little to eat that I dreamed the night long of dinners 
 I had eaten, and might have been eating." 
 
 Idem. 
 
 " We have neither sugar nor salt : it is hard fare and scanty. In 
 the evening I shot a full-grown male nsevula. / felt very thankful 
 to the Giver of all good for this meat." 
 
 Idem. 
 
CHAPTER XXVII 
 EPILOGUE: DEAD MEN'S SHOES 
 
 THE matter ends thus. First down from tte north 
 via Kazembe's, since he died, I have cut straight 
 south with my reader, following up Livingstone 
 in his " long last mile." ^ This last mile of the wilderness 
 track is both literally and typically a very tragic kind of 
 thing. The vertical rays get you ; the tantalising river 
 for camp is too far off, and finally you feel your tongue too 
 big for your mouth. Brethren all, let us ask God, ask 
 Him often, that ours may be as fine a finish as Livingstone's : 
 
 " Carry me over the long last mile, 
 Man of Nazareth, Christ for me." 
 
 It is, I suppose, superfluous to add that he who ended his 
 long last mile literally on his knees in prayer did so 
 symbolically — true type, I mean, of the old Sir George 
 Grey school, the ideal colonial expansion of any Christian 
 land. In Central Africa his native name, I have said, 
 is " Ingeresa," which very obviously means " The English- 
 man." Means, therefore, that this praying pioneer stands 
 as the stereotyped symbol of our Anglo-Saxon race. Means 
 that the man from England who prays not is no " English- 
 man " (or Livingstone-like man), for to be " Ingeresa-like " 
 the day begins and ends with prayer. That is to say, this 
 far excellence " Englishman " is the first one of the coming 
 many. The generic has become the specific, and all the 
 succeeding goods are supposed to be up to sample, Living- 
 stone the initial specimen of the same. 
 
 Even when he lay down for the last time with dysentery 
 
 > Note this vital matter of direction. First came the American Glave 
 from the east; then Weatherly, astutely avoiding Mieremiere, came from 
 the north-west. 
 
 361 
 
S62 EPILOGUE: DEAD MEN'S SHOES 
 
 and confessed Anno Domini had conquered, we have seen 
 the flag of faith flying to the very end over his little grass 
 hut. Surely never did Blake's phrase win to its own as 
 in the case of the dying Doctor's hut, " under the thatched 
 roof of rusted gold." Owing to the truculencies of modem 
 literature I am painfully aware this sounds far too 
 " preachy " ; Gardiner was right, sympathy with reckless 
 adventure divorced from moral considerations is a too 
 human trait. There is no shorter cut to the idolatry of 
 men than by the path of courage, let the motives be good 
 or bad. Was not Lord Brougham so captivated by the 
 devil of Paradise Lost that he said he was sorry he did 
 not win ? 
 
 An amusing instance of Livingstone's modesty is found 
 iu his Journals where this name " Ingeresa " occurs. He 
 quotes the natives as saying, " The English have come," 
 whereas the noun was in the singular and means the arrival 
 of this man D.L., " The Englishman," not the whole 
 national mob under The Jack, Yet Livingstone adroitly 
 dodges the inferred compliment and repeats his old roguery 
 that day they cheered him on the Clyde. Standing on the 
 deck with the Foreign Ambassador, his fellow Clydesiders 
 saw him and cheered loyally. But turning to him, Living- 
 stone passed on the cheers, remarking that Scotland liked 
 foreigners ! Not that the Ambassador would stand for 
 stealing another man's burst of cheering. The more so 
 as this modest Livingstone was not the sort who went 
 round the world looking down on everyone but his conceited 
 self. 
 
 People have laughed at Livingstone for steppiag out 
 in his old age like a P.B. with no guaranteed salary. 
 " Indeed," said he, " I had flattered myseK that I had 
 much prospective comfort in store for me in my old days. 
 And pecuniary matters required looking after for the sake 
 of my family ; but since you ask me in that way, I cannot 
 refuse you." In fact, he only went because another very 
 famous man had bluntly demanded a sufl&cient remunera- 
 tion for his services : he could not think, at his time of life, 
 to undertake anything of the sort unless it was prepaid. 
 Then Sir Roderick turned his back on this " sane man," 
 
EPILOGUE: DEAD MEN'S SHOES 363 
 
 for, says Stanley, " all sane men will at once recognise the 
 wisdom whicti guided him in his reply, as it is scarcely fair 
 to expect a man of advanced years to undertake a mission 
 of this nature without ample compensation for exchanging 
 the conveniences of civilised life for the dangers and priva- 
 tions that constantly menace and surround an explorer 
 in Central Africa." Baffled, but not beaten, Sir Roderick 
 Murchison, President of the R.G.S., makes straight for 
 simple, other-worldly Livingstone, who at once capitulates 
 on the no-cash phase of this his last loyal venture ! Choking 
 down regrets that his weary bones wiU have no rest, yet 
 proud to prove that money is a minor matter, he accepted 
 the commission that was to eventuate in his death down 
 here at Ilala. 
 
 True, Sir Roderick promised this and that, but Sir 
 Roderick's arm of flesh was soon dead in the dust. Yet 
 God has a host of helpers who are knights in deed if not 
 in name. " Doctor Livingstone doing it all without a 
 salary ? " said the incredulous American millionaire 
 Bennett, " a Lord-will-provide expedition ? Of course, the 
 Lord will provide and / am going to help Him." General 
 Gordon had given the challenge to Sir Richard Burton in 
 the words : " You know the hopelessness of such a task as 
 African Missions till you find a St. Paul or a St. John. 
 Their representatives nowadays want so much per year 
 and a contract." Livingstone it was who met their 
 challenge and, s'emharquer sans biscuits, marched off in faith 
 with little songs singing in his soul. Gordon himself was 
 " mad " enough to do it ; Livingstone, likewise, had 
 a dash of this divine madness in him, St. Paul beating both 
 of them with his " we are fools for Christ's sake " ! 
 " Honour not honours " was such a favourite motto of 
 Gordon that he wrote it on all his letters. Livingstone 
 liked and lived this motto too. When Earl Russell sent 
 to probe him as to what " honour " he coveted for himseK, 
 then it was the-ever-unmindful-of-himself Livingstone 
 threw away a knighthood that had com6 abegging and said, 
 " If you stop the Portuguese slave trade you will gratify 
 me beyond measure ! " 
 
 I have mentioned Gordon's moral affinity with Living- 
 
364 EPILOGUE: DEAD MEN'S SHOES 
 
 stone because both were singular men out for the singular, 
 not the plural, out for " honour not honours." Simple- 
 hearted Gordon thought that Burton, the man who had 
 coined this honour-not-honours jingle, would despise the 
 money phase of this noble venture. So he offered " the 
 Burtons " (plural, please) the Governor-Generalship of 
 Darfur with £3,000 a year and a couple of secretaries at 
 £300 each. Came the sweet, smirking reply from the lady, 
 that it would " hardly be enough to buy gloves " ! 
 " Gloves ? " rapped back Gordon. " Do you wear those 
 skin coverings to your paws 1 No, £1,600 or indeed 
 £16,000 would never compensate a man for a year spent 
 actively in Darfur. But I considered you, from your 
 independence, one of Nature's nobility, who did not serve 
 for money. Excuse the mistake — if such it is. I suppose 
 you know that old creature Grant who for seventeen or 
 eighteen years has traded on his wonderful African walk ? " 
 
 " These be thy gods, Israel ! " In or out of ilissions 
 this " trading on his African walk " is the blackest phase 
 of all the " quitters " who run in and out of this poor 
 old continent of ours. Not so did Livingstone. Not so 
 did Gordon. Yet nearly all the runaways got their title, 
 got their rewards, while men, majestic men like Dr. Robert 
 Laws of Livingstonia, " our Sir Robert," the true successor 
 of David Livingstone, goes on imflinchingly with " honour 
 not honours." 
 
 1873, 1874, 1875 — ah ! these early seventies were the 
 great years for a very special sort of explorer in the land. 
 Stretching in a straight line from north to south see what 
 you have got : Gordon up at Khartoum preaching salva- 
 tion by grace alone ; Stanley giving Mtesa ten deliberate 
 days of Christian teaching ; then, here in the south, you 
 have Livingstone in full flood all the time. Not a parson 
 in the lot ; no professional preaching this, therefore all 
 the more genuine and heart-melting. Does not a message 
 from the heart generally contrive to reach the heart ? 
 These men of backbone were not such long-eared donkeys 
 as to imagine that " virtue " has a meek, mild, and 
 motherly sort of meaning. Where does that godlike word 
 " virtue " come from if not from this manly word, vir, a man, 
 
Till'; 'I'lfltKE S'I'AdKS C)|.' MAKIXd 1. 1 \'l \( iS'l'l )X K '^ I.AST HUT 
 
 l\ 'rilK I:AIX, 'I'lIK r.AST IIKIXC the ACriAL STKrt'Tl'RE 
 
 A,< i;KCiiXS'ri:C('TKJi bV 'I'lIK VKUV MKX WHn ^IADE 'I'HK 
 
 OUIGIXAL ONK. 
 
 364] 
 
EPILOGUE: DEAD MEN'S SHOES 365 
 
 yea, I say, and more than a man ? Therefore the supremely 
 virtuous man, and there is no hint that virtue is a meek, 
 milk-and-water sort of thing. 
 
 When Josh Billings with a merry twinkle said that 
 " next tew being virtewous, I would like tew he tuff," he won 
 the laugh but lost the logic of the thing. Missed, I mean, 
 the point that the toughest thing on the planet is virtue. 
 Take it logically or philologicaUy, " virtue " is only spelling 
 '■ virility " in six letters instead of eight : and what is true 
 and trusty toughness if not that or nothing ? Too long 
 the blessed backbone of this word, virtue, has been ignored 
 by the manhood of the land. But as surely as God, The 
 AJl- Virtuous, is also the All-Strong, so sure is it that man 
 made in His image should have a nature akin to his name, 
 should be vir, the virile man with wVtue, the virile nature. 
 This explains and almost extenuates the molten-lava 
 language of many a young man who has revolted against 
 this emasculation of manhood. The impeccable patois 
 de Canan of the pietist is just as pernicious as the baser 
 brag of the Sons of Belial. 
 
 Listen to Gordon Pasha : 
 
 " It is precisely because we are despicable and worthless 
 that we are accepted. Till we throw over that idea that 
 we are better than others, we can never have that assur- 
 ance." 
 
 " We must give up keeping credit lists with God, which 
 are not true ones; all are debtor lists. Do you know 
 that verse, Eph. ii. 10, which says that ye are ordained 
 to bring forth good works ? If certain good works are 
 ordained to be brought forth by you, why should you glory 
 in them ? " 
 
 " When one knows the little one does of oneself, and 
 anyone praise you, I, at any rate, have a rising in the gorge, 
 which is a suppressed. You lie." 
 
 Then listen to Stanley, warm-hearted convert of 
 Livingstone : 
 
 " The drums sounded. Mtesa had seated himself on 
 
366 EPILOGUE: DEAD MEN'S SHOES 
 
 the throne, and we hastened to take our seats. Since the 
 5th of April, I had enjoyed ten interviews with Mtesa, and 
 during all I had taken occasion to introduce topics which 
 would lead up to the subject of Christianity. Nothing 
 occurred in my fresence but I contrived to turn it towards 
 effecting that which had become an object to me, viz. his con- 
 version." 
 
 " There was no attempt made to confuse him with the 
 details of any particular doctrine. I simply drew for him 
 the image of the Son of God humbling Himself for the good 
 of all mankind, white and black, and told him how, while 
 He was in man's disguise. He was seized and crucified 
 by wicked people who scorned His divinity, and yet out of 
 His great love for them, while yet suffering on the Cross, 
 He asked His great Father to forgive them." 
 
 Another case : the same sort of helpful affinity between 
 a senior and his jimior, Gordon and the splendid Colonel 
 Linant de Bellefondes, one of the best Belgians who ever 
 came into Central Africa. We who are not worthy to 
 stand in these " dead men's shoes," let us listen to the tale 
 (utterly inexcusable this in art or probability !), the true 
 dead-men's-shoes-tale, of a dead man's boot. It is an 
 Anglo-Belgian chronicle, and told in ten interlocutors the 
 story constellates round Stanley's famous letter to The 
 Daily Telegraph, a call to sleeping England to advance 
 and evangelise Uganda. 
 
 1. But who will take this flaming letter home ; who if 
 not a timely Belgian colonel going north to Gordon Pasha 
 via the Nile ? 
 
 2. Then what if this good fellow, Linant de Bellefondes, 
 has to fight his way through, sustaining for fourteen hours 
 the attack of several thousand Wanyoro at one point ? 
 
 3. Then what if, at last, the wild Baris kill this brave 
 Belgian with thirty-six of his Soudanese soldiers, Colonel 
 and aU, letter and all ? Killed by two spear stabs on the 
 banks of a brawling stream by the aborigines ? 
 
 4. Further, what if the dead Colonel is wearing long 
 Wellington boots and secreted in one of these long knee- 
 
EPILOGUE: DEAD MEN'S SHOES 367 
 
 boots is the sacred letter, so sacred that there it lies un- 
 touched, untampered with ? 
 
 5. This because these Baris not being cannibals — why 
 touch the body 1 
 
 6. Then what if the avenging column comes along ? 
 
 7. And punishes the murderers ? 
 
 8. Then rescues the body ? 
 
 9. Rescues, likewise, that WeUington boot on the dead 
 man's leg ? 
 
 10. And, finally, rescues also (hurrah !) the burning call 
 in the Stanley letter ? 
 
 But who is this brave Belgian, and why is he in these 
 latitudes ? That boot belonged to a man sent on a special 
 mission by Gordon Pasha to spy out the land in Uganda 
 with possible aimexation by the Egyptian Government, 
 Moslem Government. Arrived at Uganda he found he 
 was too late for Islam, too late because of the prior arrival 
 of the Christian Stanley. Is he, therefore, nonplussed ? 
 Read Stanley's record of their fraternising, and you soon 
 see how the matter was no mere formal fiction, Christ 
 was king that day. Certainly, the claims of Christ were 
 never compromised for the paltry annexation propaganda, 
 of any monarch of Islam. Thus it is you reach this double 
 picture of earthly failure. Heavenly success. The devil 
 is defeated once again : all hell hurried out to the death 
 of this brave letter-carrier, for graven in that letter were 
 lines of heart-throb, a call for the Church to advance with 
 the Gospel of Life. They killed him, yet this seeming 
 success is hell's own failure, actual and awful failure. The 
 God who rescued Paul's Epistles for posterity, can He not 
 do the same with Stanley's letter ? Yes, the good God is 
 on guard by the Nile. Same God, same NUe, where angel 
 bands watched over Moses in his bulrush ark. 
 
 I am not labouring the point, not the least bit. This 
 post-mortem letter gathered all its momentum from Gordon 
 Pasha's telling the tragic tale of its chequered history en 
 route. When the Christian portion of England heard of 
 the blood-stained missive it thrilled to the call for help. 
 As a mere letter sent by normal post arriving in normal 
 manner it might have fallen flat, only to be pigeonholed 
 
368 EPILOGUE: DEAD MEN'S SHOES 
 
 by the nation. The blood-marks did the deed : blood is 
 thicker than — ink. Gordon said that but for the blood of 
 Christ, nor Paul nor ink had ever combined to record His 
 deathless message. And so He maketh the wrath of men 
 to praise Hitn, He who rules by overruling. The returning 
 Belgian failed on the up-journey to Uganda, but the home 
 trip down-stream was crowned with blessing for untold 
 thousands. The blazing red shirt he wore, no doubt, made 
 him a target for the Bari lances, but God was above it all, a 
 God whose many and minute means can never be thwarted. 
 Why did not the Baris finish their deed of blood in 
 the old tribal manner, stripping the body to the skin for 
 the last inch of loot ? Then the wild animals ? I have 
 seen dead bodies torn to a hundred shreds by ignoble 
 hyenas and jackals ; even a lion does not disdain old bones, 
 old boots, old clothes ! Yet here God warned them off 
 His choice bit of correspondence. White ants could easily 
 have eaten up that select epistle in an hour or two 
 but for Heaven's ban and interdict warning off aU such 
 enemies. 
 
 Told at length, the results of this woidd fill many chap- 
 ters, but I have no space to elaborate them all. Neverthe- 
 less to prove that here we have no mere fantastic playing 
 with words let us come to close quarters with our brave 
 Belgian Colonel. It is delightful to find from Stanley's 
 side of the story how this letter was as much hidden away 
 in Linant's heart as in his long boot. In his niuth chapter 
 Stanley tells with what pleasure he f oimd the Belgian arrival 
 endorsiug all he said to Mtesa : 
 
 " The religious conversations which I had begun with 
 Mtesa were maintained in the presence of M. Linant de 
 BeUefondes, who, fortunately for the cause I had iu view, 
 was a Protestant. For when questioned by Mtesa about 
 the facts which I had uttered, and which had been faithfully 
 transcribed, M. Liuant, to Mtesa's astonishment, employed 
 nearly the same words, and delivered the same responses. 
 The remarkable fact that two white men, who had never 
 met before, one having arrived from the south-east, the 
 other having emerged from the north, should nevertheless 
 both know the same things, and respond in the same words. 
 
EPILOGUE: DEAD MEN'S SHOES 869 
 
 charmed the popular mind without the burzah as a winder, 
 and was treasured in Mtesa's memory as being miraculous." 
 
 The Belgian Coloners side of the story is even more 
 zealous than this, incorporated in an official report too. 
 In the original manuscript, which was in the possession of 
 General C. P. Stone, Chief of the Stafi in his Highness the 
 KJiedive's service. M. Linant puts some Gordonese gush 
 in the dry old report as he alludes to these hours devoted 
 to religious instruction. A voice from another world it 
 seemed to those Cairo officials down-stream ! What a 
 charming picture of unity and its outcome ! Is there 
 nothing prophetic in it aU, nothing presaging the fact that 
 it was in these very latitudes the first Kikuyu Conference 
 took place ? Here are two laymen setting the whole 
 union movement in motion, caUing on Missionaries to 
 leave England, a dark place of divided ways and divided 
 coimsels, and push on to second what they had begun. 
 Linant had caught the fire from his chief, Gordon Pasha : 
 Stanley has let all the world know what the impact of 
 Livingstone's character did to his soul ; and here you have 
 these two men heart to heart, planning this great clarion 
 call for Missionaries to advance in God's name, for God's 
 sake. 
 
 Spare me your indulgent shrug of the shoulder at all this 
 " dead men's shoes " fantasia. There is more than that 
 if you press me to tell it. I personally have a very intimate 
 link with many such shoes. " Dead letter office ? " nay, 
 the living God rescued that living letter unto the ultimate 
 founding of a Kving testimony in Uganda — a long knee- 
 boot God's pillar box in the desert ! 
 
 " Dead men's shoes " is an old phrase with all con- 
 ceivable implications : I have often stood in them both 
 metaphorically and actually when cut off from supplies. 
 But one pair I shall never forget, and the Bihean I bartered 
 them from told me their history in seven points : 
 
 1. A Portuguese Baron, poisoner in Lisboa, is exiled to 
 Bihe. 
 
 2. This imprisonment of his is a free-and-easy kind of 
 thing, not close confinement but limited to a locality. 
 
 3. Then roaming enters the Baron's blood, and ofi he 
 
 24 
 
370 EPILOGUE: DEAD MEN'S SHOES 
 
 runs across the Kwanza, over among the " Ovingangela " 
 or barbarians, as they call them. 
 
 4. Then comes the obvious end, wild beasts finish the 
 wild man except (oh ! my masters !) the boots. The very 
 boots, reserved in the chancery of Heaven for a needy 
 Missionary far further in the heart of Africa. 
 
 5. For wild beasts roam, but so do natives, and the latter 
 found the leavings of the former. 
 
 6. Then now they are on the move getting 200 miles 
 nearer me, for they hawk them ia a slaver's camp who is 
 ofE ialand with his horde of misanthropes, and get calico 
 in exchange. 
 
 7. Finally, here comes the heavenly parcels post for me, 
 and (long later !) the boots disdained by these bare-footed 
 blacks come as solace to my ten weary toes. 
 
 Then it was I got the whole weird tale of the wanderiags 
 of these two boots. Yes, and squirmed sentimentally for 
 a day or two. But at last I was forced, by pinch of 
 circumstances and pinched toes, to thank God for boots 
 of any kind from any direction. So it was I stood up and 
 faced my African tramp in a dead man's shoes. Murderer 
 and poisoner though he was, we both measured for No. 
 8's. Had not Heaven measured us both ? The same 
 Heaven that knew my need, and met it neatly and nicely 
 with a No. 8 boot for a No. 8 foot. 
 
 And now to conclude, for I have no more space and my 
 reader no more patience. Be it dead men's shoes or a 
 man's own pair received by last parcels post, these shoes 
 most surely symbolise the coming of the white man to a 
 land that never wore such foot-gear. We have seen that 
 when Dr. Livingstone first came in here they spotted 
 his boots and seemed to see in this expedient of toe-con- 
 stricting much more restricting ahead. So they called him 
 Mr. He-hath-no-toes (Atadinefikondo). Ten good toes 
 means ten good digit-grips on crossing a one-pole bridge 
 thrown over a stream. Thus there is restriction in this 
 constriction of boot-leather, they think the whites came 
 along to make many enactions that are exactions. His 
 ten wives, ten houses, ten jars of beer, are all lost as well 
 as his " lost " ten toes in boots ! That is to say, this 
 
jr V 
 
 
 :>> 
 
 ^.^•^. 
 
 {^""^p-^ 
 
 •■ GOD MAKES A 
 
 -AiAX-s 
 
 FACE, BUT A 
 
 .MAX 
 
 MAKES HIS OWX 
 
 1 '(irx- 
 
 TEXAXCE.- 
 
 
 This is a contras( 
 
 ir(Mr,-n 
 
 a Christian and a 
 
 hmI Ih-11 
 
 liing- : -(vhieh is 
 
 Wllirl, .' 
 
 X'eed one ask 
 
 
 4^;.;.^ •■^S!?*K' 
 
 '<!♦ 
 
 4 
 
 h ■■wm i 
 
 370] 
 
EPILOGUE: DEAD MEN'S SHOES 371 
 
 parable-mad negro thinks that the gains of civilisation are 
 offset by their pains and every fro we innovate has its corre- 
 sponding con. For do not the retarding boots that save 
 his shins also imprison his ten toes ? In other and more 
 withering words, the black man thinks that we have gobbled 
 up his land without either fair right or fair fight. We wipe 
 out things in such a sweeping manner that his phrasing 
 of it is, " You whites are so greedy that having swallowed 
 up the bam-yard fowl you then follow up the fowl with its 
 own feathers, eating both fowl and feathers ! " 
 
 When Livingstone said that we are out here in Africa 
 " to change not so much the face of Africa as the face of 
 the African," what did he mean ? This, that be it male or 
 female, " God makes a man's face, but a man makes his 
 own countenance." And it is this tell-tale latter that gives 
 away the human being. In Africa the face can be as ugly 
 as a conspiracy of dead ancestors could combine to be- 
 queath it, and yet it Ues with the man or woman to make or 
 mar that elusive coat-of-arms of the soul called the coun- 
 tenance. 
 
 Her face was wan and pinched and thin. 
 But splendour struck it from within, 
 
 Cain got his brand, but it was not the brand-new thing 
 a humble feUow gets when God puts a shine in his face. The 
 facial handicap is not a mere matter of a squint eye or 
 marks reminiscent of small-pox, for in these lands they used 
 to lop hands and crop ears. But the saved soul can be so 
 soundly converted that be the body as bad-looking as it 
 happens to be, out streams that " shine of the soul " 
 both bringing and giving sunshine. Few would pay him 
 a higher compliment than that the man is inherently ugly. 
 Yet here is the contradictory countenance lodging a counter- 
 claim for the fellow, telling how Heaven has begun a work 
 that will have no end until the^ugly old body is changed 
 into St. Paul's " without-spot-or-wrinkle-or-any-such-thing 
 one. At any rate this saved soul-mark of the shining 
 countenance is spiritual, not physical, for is it not of God 
 the Spirit we read, " the light of His countenance " ? 
 Therefore, the more spiritual we are the more emphatic 
 
372 EPILOGUE: DEAD MEN'S SHOES 
 
 our emphasis on this Godlike thing called the countenance. 
 It defeats and defies facial mutilations and malformations. 
 
 I press this point for the average native is a clever rogue 
 with his changing countenance. Knowing its teU-tale 
 tendency, his rule is to lead-off with arranging it for 
 indifference to or, if possible, ignorance of the prevailing 
 topic. How different in 2 Cor. i. 11, where Paul picks out 
 the very faces of the saints as being the real praisers of 
 God, not their big mouths : " that by the means of many 
 faces [Greek] thanks may be given by many on our behalf." 
 And that this is not twaddle let me quote the very latest 
 from the highest judicial authority in the land : it is 
 the Lord Chief Justice of England who speaks in Septem- 
 ber 1920 : 
 
 " As Lord Chief Justice of England and the head of the 
 judicial administration of the criminal law of England, I 
 have good reason to speak well of the Salvation Army. 
 As I speak to you now I can conjure up the face of a man 
 who stood in the dock before me. It was transfigured by 
 faith. He had been a criminal aU his life, and, arrested 
 for a grave crime, he was tried, convicted and sentenced 
 to a long term of imprisonment. That man stood in the 
 dock before me when I presided in the Court of Criminal 
 Appeal. In the interval he had been reached by the 
 Salvation Army. The man's face was no longer that of a 
 criminal. It was the face of one who had found his God, 
 and by reason of that reformation my brother judges and 
 I set aside the sentence of long years, believing in our 
 hearts that the man would go forth and help other men." 
 
 At the risk of repeating myseU here comes a cubninatiag 
 instance dovetailing into our surroundings here. I mean 
 in this case of " as others see us " you get not a carnal 
 fake, but a thrilling certainty. Two of our folks are return- 
 ing after a month's voyage round the Lake and the Govern- 
 ment Administrator is sitting in our verandah with his 
 wife. Cold outsiders and critical as cold, two make- 
 believe " untouchables." Then the burst of welcoming 
 praise begins down the long street and — ^yes, this does it. 
 Growing in volume as they draw nearer with this choral 
 welcome ; heart-warming hymns to thrice welcome folks. 
 
EPILOGUE: DEAD MEN'S SHOES 373 
 
 They are now coming up the Palm Avenue. Then it is 
 the dramatic thing happens : what do you think ? The 
 cold-as-ice French Madam s'il vous plait bursts into tears 
 and weeps with a will. So affected is she at the sweet- 
 faced singers praising His Name. The surprise was ours 
 more than hers ; who knows what goes on under the skin 
 of stand-offish folks ? " Oh," she cried, " it is the happy 
 faces I am weeping about." 
 
 " For the Colonel's lady and Judith O'Chrady 
 Are sisters under their skin." 
 
L'ENVOI 
 
 TO 
 
 THE GLORIOUS MEMORY 
 
 OP 
 
 THAT LONG LINE OE AFRIOANI 
 
 SIMON OP GYRENE, THE EIRST AFRICAN BAPTIZED POR 
 
 AFRICA ; APOLLO OP ALEXANDRIA, THE PIRST AFRICAN 
 
 MIGHTY IN THE SCRIPTURES ; KATHARINA, PELICITAS AND 
 
 PERPETUA, THE FIRST WOMEN WHO DIED FOR CHRIST IN 
 
 AFRICA ; FRUMENTIUS, THE FIRST TRANSLATOR OP GOD's 
 
 WORD INTO A LANGUAGE OP AFRICA ; 
 
 AND 
 
 THAT GREAT ARMY OF MARTYRS, EVANGELISTS, EXPLORERS 
 
 AND OTHERS 
 
 WHO 
 
 FOUGHT POR THEIR DREAM 
 
 THOUGH 
 
 IT FILLED NOT THEIR POCKETS. 
 
Primed in Great Britain by Hazelly Watson A Vin§ift Ld.^ 
 London and AyUibury, 
 
y&yjm 
 
 mi^.