THE WATER-ROUTE TO THE HEART OF AFRICA.

Three distinct Africas are known to the modern world—North Africa, where men go for health; South Africa, where they go for money; and Central Africa, where they go for adventure. The first, the old Africa of Augustine and Carthage, every one knows from history; the geography of the second, the Africa of the Zulu and the diamond, has been taught us by two Universal Educators—War and the Stock-Exchange; but our knowledge of the third, the Africa of Livingstone and Stanley, is still fitly symbolized by the vacant look upon our maps which tells how long this mysterious land has kept its secret.

Into the heart of this mysterious Africa I wish to take you with me now. And let me magnify my subject by saying at once that it is a wonderful thing to see. It is a wonderful thing to start from the civilization of Europe, pass up these mighty rivers, and work your way into that unknown land—work your way alone, and on foot, mile after mile, month after month, among strange birds and beasts and plants and insects, meeting tribes which have no name, speaking tongues which no man can interpret, till you have reached its secret heart, and stood where white man has never trod before. It is a wonderful thing to look at this weird world of human beings—half animal half children, wholly savage and wholly heathen; and to turn and come back again to civilization before the impressions have had time to fade, and while the myriad problems of so strange a spectacle are still seething in the mind. It is an education to see this sight—an education in the meaning and history of man. To have been here is to have lived before Menes. It is to have watched the dawn of evolution. It is to have the great moral and social problems of life, of anthropology, of ethnology, and even of theology, brought home to the imagination in the most new and startling light.

On the longest day of a recent summer—midwinter therefore in the tropics—I left London. A long railway run across France, Switzerland, and Italy brings one in a day or two to the Mediterranean. Crossing to Alexandria, the traveller strikes across Egypt over the Nile, through the battlefield of Tel-el-Kebir, to the Red Sea, steams down its sweltering length to Aden, tranships, and, after three lifetimes of deplorable humiliation in the south-west Monsoons, terminates his sufferings at Zanzibar.

Zanzibar is the focus of all East African exploration. No matter where you are going in the interior, you must begin at Zanzibar. Oriental in its appearance, Mohammedan in its religion, Arabian in its morals, this cesspool of wickedness is a fit capital for the Dark Continent. But Zanzibar is Zanzibar simply because it is the only apology for a town on the whole coast. An immense outfit is required to penetrate this shopless and foodless land, and here only can the traveller make up his caravan. The ivory and slave trades have made caravaning a profession, and everything the explorer wants is to be had in these bazaars, from a tin of sardines to a repeating rifle. Here these black villains, the porters, the necessity and the despair of travellers, the scum of old slave gangs, and the fugitives from justice from every tribe, congregate for hire. And if there is one thing on which African travellers are for once agreed, it is that for laziness, ugliness, stupidness, and wickedness, these men are not to be matched on any continent in the world. Their one strong point is that they will engage themselves for the Victoria Nyanza or for the Grand Tour of the Tanganyika with as little ado as a Chamounix guide volunteers for the Jardin; but this singular avidity is mainly due to the fact that each man cherishes the hope of running away at the earliest opportunity. Were it only to avoid requiring to employ these gentlemen, having them for one's sole company month after month, seeing them transgress every commandment in turn before your eyes—you yourself being powerless to check them except by a wholesale breach of the sixth—it would be worth while to seek another route into the heart of Africa.

But there is a much graver objection to the Zanzibar route to the interior. Stanley started by this route on his search for Livingstone, two white men with him; he came back without them. Cameron set out by the same path to cross Africa with two companions; before he got to Tanganyika he was alone. The Geographical Society's late expedition, under Mr. Keith Johnstone, started from Zanzibar with two Europeans; the hardy and accomplished leader fell within a couple of months. These expeditions have all gone into the interior by this one fatal way, and probably every second man, by fever or by accident, has left his bones to bleach along the road. Hitherto there has been no help for it. The great malarious coast-belt must be crossed, and one had simply to take his life in his hands and go through with it.

But now there is an alternative. There is a rival route into the interior, which, though it is not without its dark places too, will probably yet become the great highway from the East to Central Africa. Let me briefly sketch it:

Africa, speaking generally, is a vast, ill-formed triangle. It has no peninsulas; it has almost no islands or bays or fjords. But three great inlets, three mighty rivers piercing it to the very heart, have been allocated by a kind Nature, one to each of its solid sides. On the north is the river of the past, flowing through Egypt, as Leigh Hunt says, "like some grave, mighty thought threading a dream"; on the west, the river of the future, the not less mysterious Congo; and on the east the little known Zambesi.

The physical features of this great continent are easily grasped. From the coast a low scorched plain, reeking with malaria, extends inland in unbroken monotony for two or three hundred miles. This is succeeded by mountains slowly rising into a plateau some 2000 or 3000 feet high; and this, at some hundreds of miles distance, forms the pedestal for a second plateau, as high again. This last plateau, 4000 to 5000 feet high, may be said to occupy the whole of Central Africa. It is only on the large scale, however, that these are to be reckoned plateaux at all. When one is upon them he sees nothing but mountains and valleys and plains of the ordinary type, covered for the most part with forest.

I have said that Nature has supplied each side of Africa with one great river. By going some hundreds of miles southward along the coast from Zanzibar the traveller reaches the mouth of the Zambesi. Livingstone sailed up this river once, and about a hundred miles from its mouth discovered another river twisting away northwards among the mountains. The great explorer was not the man to lose such a chance of penetrating the interior. He followed this river up, and after many wanderings found himself on the shores of a mighty lake. The river is named the Shiré, and the lake—the existence of which was quite unknown before, is Lake Nyassa. Lake Nyassa is 350 miles long; so that, with the Zambesi, the Shiré, and this great lake, we have the one thing required to open up East Central Africa—a water-route to the interior. But this is not all. Two hundred and fifty miles from the end of Lake Nyassa another lake of still nobler proportions takes up the thread of communication. Lake Tanganyika is 450 miles in length. Between the lakes stands a lofty plateau, cool, healthy, accessible, and without any physical barrier to interrupt the explorer's march. By this route the Victoria Nyanza and the Albert Nyanza may be approached with less fatigue, less risk, and not less speed, than by the overland trail from Zanzibar. At one point also, along this line, one is within a short march of that other great route which must ever be regarded as the trunk-line of the African continent. The watershed of the Congo lies on this Nyassa-Tanganyika plateau. This is the stupendous natural highway on which so much of the future of East Central Africa must yet depend.

Ten days' languid steaming from Zanzibar brings the traveller to the Zambesi mouth. The bar here has an evil reputation, and the port is fixed on a little river which flows into the Indian Ocean slightly to the north, but the upper reaches of which almost join the Zambesi at some distance inland. This port is the Portuguese settlement of Quilimane, and here I said good-bye to the steamer and to civilization. Some distance in the interior stands a solitary pioneer Mission station of the Established Church of Scotland, and still farther in, on Lake Nyassa, another outpost of a sister church. My route led past both these stations, and I had the good fortune to pick up on the way two or three young fellow-countrymen who were going up to relieve the mission staff. For the latter part of my journey I was quite alone. All African work, as a rule, is done single-handed. It is not always easy to find a companion for such a project, and the climate is so pestilential that when two go, you and your friend are simply nursing each other time about, and the expedition never gets on. On the whole, however, the solitary course is not to be commended. An unutterable loneliness comes over one at times in the great still forests, and there is a stage in African fever—and every one must have fever—when the watchful hand of a friend may make the difference between life and death.

After leaving Quilimane, the first week of our journey up the Qua-qua was one long picnic. We had two small row-boats, the sterns covered with a sun-proof awning, and under these we basked, and talked, and read and prospected, from dawn to sunset. Each boat was paddled by seven or eight natives—muscular heathens, whose sole dress was a pocket-handkerchief, a little palm oil, and a few mosquitoes. Except at first the river was only a few yards broad, and changed in character and novelty every hour. Now it ran through a grove of cocoa-nut palms—the most wonderful and beautiful tree of the tropics. Now its sullen current oozed through a fœtid swamp of mangroves—the home of the crocodile and the hippopotamus, whose slimy bodies wallowed into the pools with a splash as our boats sped past. Again the banks became green and graceful, the long plumed grasses bending to the stream, and the whole a living aviary of birds—the white ibis and the gaunt fish eagle, and the exquisite blue and scarlet kingfisher watching its prey from the overhanging boughs. The businesslike air of this last bird is almost comical, and somehow sits ill on a creature of such gorgeous beauty. One expects him to flutter away before the approach of so material a thing as a boat, display his fairy plumage in a few airy movements, and melt away in the sunshine. But there he sits, stolid and impassive, and though the spray of the paddles almost dashes in his face, the intent eyes never move, and he refuses to acknowledge the intruder by so much as a glance. His larger ally, the black and white spotted kingfisher, if less beautiful, is much more energetic, and darts about the bank incessantly, coquetting with the boat from reach to reach, and seldom allowing an inspection close enough to take in the details of his piebald coat.

One interests oneself in these things more particularly because there is nothing at first especially striking about the river scenery itself. Ten or twenty feet of bank cuts off the view on either side, and large and varied features are wanting. The banks are lined with the densest jungle of mangroves and aquatic grasses, while creepers of a hundred kinds struggle for life among the interlacing stems. We saw crocodiles here in such numbers that count was very soon lost. They were of all sizes, from the baby specimen which one might take home in a bottle to the enormous bullet-proof brute the size of an 81-ton gun. These revolting animals take their siesta in the heat of the day, lying prone upon the bank, with their wedge-shaped heads directed towards the water. When disturbed they scuttle into the river with a wriggling movement, the precipitancy of which defies the power of sight. The adjustment of the adult crocodile to its environment in the matter of color is quite remarkable. The younger forms are lighter yellow, and more easily discoverable, but it takes the careful use of a good pair of eyes to distinguish in the gnarled slime-covered log lying among the rotting stumps the living form of the mature specimen. Between the African crocodiles and the alligators there is the slightest possible external difference; although the longer head, the arrangement of scales, the fringed feet with their webbed toes, the uniform teeth, and the protrusion of the large canine, distinguish them from their American allies.

Many of the ibises I shot as we moved along, for food for the men, who, like all Africans, will do anything for flesh in whatever form. For ourselves, we lived upon emaciated fowls and tinned meats, cooking them at a fire on the bank when the boat stopped. Eggs are never eaten by the natives, but always set; although, if you offer to buy them, the natives will bring you a dozen from a sitting hen, which they assure you were laid that very morning. In the interior, on many occasions afterwards, these protestations were tested, and always proved false. One time, when nearly famished and far from camp, I was brought a few eggs which a chief himself guaranteed had that very hour been laid. With sincere hope that he might be right, but with much misgiving, I ordered the two freshest looking to be boiled. With the despair of a starving man I opened them. They were cock and hen.

Breakfast and luncheon and dinner are all the same in Africa. There is no beef, nor mutton, nor bread, nor flour, nor sugar, nor salt, nor anything whatever, except an occasional fowl, which an Englishman can eat. Hence the enormous outfit which he must carry with him. No one has any idea of what can be had in tins till he camps out abroad. Every conceivable digestible and indigestible is to be had tinned, every form of fish, flesh, fowl, and game, every species of vegetable, and fruit, every soup, sweet, and entrée; but after two or three months of this sort of thing you learn that this tempting semblance of variety is a gigantic imposition. The sole difference between these various articles lies, like the Rhine wines, in the label. Plum pudding or kippered herring taste just the same. Whether you begin dinner with tinned calves-foot jelly or end with tinned salmon makes no difference; and after six months it is only by a slight feeling of hardness that you do not swallow the tins themselves.

At the end of a too short week we left our boats behind. Engaging an army of shy natives at a few huts near the bank, we struck across a low neck of land, and after an hour's walk found ourselves suddenly on the banks of the Zambesi. A solitary bungalow was in sight, and opposite it the little steamer of the African Lakes Company, which was to take us up the Shiré. There is more in the association, perhaps, than in the landscape, to strike one as he first furrows the waters of this virgin river. We are fifty miles from its mouth, the mile-wide water shallow and brown, the low sandy banks fringed with alligators and wild birds. The great deltoid plain, yellow with sun-tanned reeds and sparsely covered with trees, stretches on every side; the sun is blistering hot; the sky, as it will be for months, a monotonous dome of blue—not a frank bright blue like the Canadian sky, but a veiled blue, a suspicious and malarious blue, partly due to the perpetual heat haze and partly to the imagination, for the Zambesi is no friend to the European, and this whole region is heavy with depressing memories.

This impression, perhaps, was heightened by the fact that we were to spend that night within a few yards of the place where Mrs. Livingstone died. Late in the afternoon we reached the spot—a low ruined hut a hundred yards from the river's bank, with a broad verandah shading its crumbling walls. A grass-grown path straggled to the doorway, and the fresh print of a hippopotamus told how neglected the spot is now. Pushing the door open, we found ourselves in a long dark room, its mud floor broken into fragments, and remains of native fires betraying its latest occupants. Turning to the right, we entered a smaller chamber, the walls bare and stained, with two glassless windows facing the river. The evening sun setting over the far-off Morumballa mountains, filled the room with its soft glow, and took our thoughts back to that Sunday evening twenty years ago, when in this same bedroom, at this same hour, Livingstone knelt over his dying wife, and witnessed the great sunset of his life.

Under a huge baobab tree—a miracle of vegetable vitality and luxuriance—stands Mrs. Livingstone's grave. The picture in Livingstone's book represents the place as well kept and surrounded with neatly-planted trees. But now it is an utter wilderness, matted with jungle grass and trodden by the beasts of the forest; and as I looked at the forsaken mound and contrasted it with her husband's tomb in Westminster Abbey, I thought perhaps the woman's love which brought her to a spot like this might be not less worthy of immortality.

The Zambesi is the great river of Eastern Africa, and, after the Congo, the Nile, and the Niger, the most important on the continent. Rising in the far interior among the marshes of Lake Dilolo, and, gathering volume from the streams which flow from the high lands connecting the north of Lake Nyassa with Inner Angola, it curves across the country for over a thousand miles like an attenuated letter S, and before its four great mouths empty the far-travelled waters into the Indian Ocean, drains an area of more than half a million square miles. As it cuts its way down the successive steps of the central plateaux its usually placid current is interrupted by rapids, narrows, cascades, and cataracts, corresponding to the plateau edges, so that like all the rivers of Africa it is only navigable in stretches of one or two hundred miles at a time. From the coast the Zambesi might be stemmed by steam-power to the rapids of Kebrabasa; and from above that point intermittently, as far as the impassable barrier of the Victoria Falls. Above this, for some distance, again follow rapids and waterfalls, but these are at length succeeded by an unbroken chain of tributaries which together form an inland waterway of a thousand miles in length. The broad lands along the banks of this noble river are subject to annual inundations like the region of the Nile, and hence their agricultural possibilities are unlimited. On the lower Zambesi, indigo, the orchila weed, and caluraba-root abound, and oil-seeds and sugar-cane could be produced in quantity to supply the whole of Europe. At present, owing to apathy and indifferent government, these magnificent resources are almost wholly undeveloped.

Next afternoon our little vessel left the Zambesi in its wake and struck up a fine lake-like expansion to the north, which represents the mouth of the Shiré. Narrower and deeper, the tributary is a better stream for navigation than the Zambesi. The scenery also is really fine, especially as one nears the mountains of the plateau, and the strange peoples and animals along the banks occupy the mind with perpetual interests. The hippopotami, prowling round the boat and tromboning at us within pistol-shot, kept us awake at night; and during the day we could see elephants, buffaloes, deer, and other large game wandering about the banks. To see the elephant at home is a sight to remember. The stupendous awkwardness of the menagerie animal, as if so large a creature were quite a mistake, vanishes completely when you watch him in his native haunts. Here he is as nimble as a kitten, and you see how perfectly this moving mountain is adapted to its habitat—how such a ponderous monster, indeed, is as natural to these colossal grasses as a rabbit to an English park. We were extremely fortunate in seeing elephants at all at this stage, and I question whether there is any other part of Africa where these animals may be observed leisurely and in safety within six weeks of London. Mr. Stanley in his Livingstone expedition was ten months in the country before he saw any; and Mr. Joseph Thomson, during his long journey to Tanganyika and back, never came across a single elephant. It is said that the whale which all travellers see in crossing the Atlantic is kept up by the steamboat companies, but I vouch that these Shiré valley elephants are independent of subsidy.

The question of the disappearance of the elephant here and throughout Africa is, as every one knows, only one of a few years. It is hard to think why this kindly and sagacious creature should have to be exterminated; why this vast store of animal energy, which might be turned into so much useful work, should be lost to civilization. But the causes are not difficult to understand. The African elephant has never been successfully tamed, and is therefore a failure as a source of energy. As a source of ivory, on the other hand, he has been but too great a success. The cost of ivory at present is about half-a-sovereign per pound. An average tusk weighs from twenty to thirty pounds. Each animal has two, and in Africa both male and female carry tusks. The average elephant is therefore worth in pounds sterling the weight in pounds avoirdupois of one of his tusks. I have frequently seen single tusks turning the scale upon ninety pounds, the pair in this case being worth nearly £100 sterling,—so that a herd of elephants is about as valuable as a gold mine. The temptation to sacrifice the animal for his tusks is therefore great; and as he becomes scarcer he will be pursued by the hunter with ever-increasing eagerness. But the truth is, sad though the confession be, the sooner the last elephant falls before the hunters bullet the better for Africa. Ivory introduces into the country at present an abnormal state of things. Upon this one article is set so enormous a premium that none other among African products secures the slightest general attention; nor will almost anyone in the interior condescend to touch the normal wealth, or develop the legitimate industries of the country, so long as a tusk remains. In addition to this, of half the real woes which now exist in Africa ivory is at the bottom. It is not only that wherever there is an article to which a fictitious value is attached the effect upon the producer is apt to be injurious; nor that wherever there is money there is temptation, covetousness, and war; but that unprincipled men, and especially Arabs, are brought into contact with the natives in the worst relation, influence them only in one, and that the lowest, direction, and leave them always worse than they find them—worse in greed, in knavery, in their belief in mankind, and in their suspicion of civilization. Further, for every tusk an Arab trader purchases he must buy, borrow, or steal a slave to carry it to the coast. Domestic slavery is bad enough, but now begins the long slave-march with its untold horrors—horrors instigated and perpetuated almost solely by the traffic in ivory. The extermination of the elephant, therefore, will mark one stage at least in the closing up of the slave-trade. The elephant has done much for Africa. The best he can do now for his country is to disappear forever.

In books of travel great chiefs are usually called kings, their wives queens, while their mud-huts are always palaces. But after seeing my first African chief at home, I found I must either change my views of kings or of authors. The regal splendor of Chipitula's court—and Chipitula was a very great chief indeed, and owned all the Shiré district—may be judged of by the fact that when I paid my respects to his highness his court-dress consisted almost exclusively of a pair of suspenders. I made this king happy for life by the gift of a scarlet tennis-cap and a few buttons. But poor Chipitula had not long to enjoy his treasures,—and I mention the incident to show what is going on every day in Africa. When I came back that way, on my return journey, I called again to receive a leopard skin which this chief had promised to trap for me, and for which he was to get in exchange certain dilapidated remnants of my wardrobe. He gave me the skin; I duly covered his, and we parted. A few days after, another white man came that way; he was a trader—the only one who has yet plied this hazardous calling in East Central Africa. He quarrelled with Chipitula over some bargain, and in a moment of passion drew his revolver and shot the chief dead on the spot. Of course he himself was instantly speared by Chipitula's men; and all his black porters, according to native etiquette, were butchered with their master. There is absolutely no law in Africa, and you can kill anybody and anybody can kill you, and no one will ask any questions.

Our next stoppage was to pay another homage—truly this is a tragic region—at another white man's grave. A few years ago Bishop Mackenzie and some other missionaries were sent to Africa by the English Universities, with instructions to try to establish a Mission in the footsteps of Livingstone. They came here; the climate overpowered them; one by one they sickened and died. With the death of the Bishop himself the site was abandoned, and the few survivors returned home. Among the hippopotamus-trampled reeds on the banks of the Shiré under a rough iron cross, lies the first of three brave bishops who have already made their graves in Equatorial Africa.

I have spoken of the Shiré as the great waterway into the interior of Eastern Africa. It has one defect. After sailing for five or six days we came to rapids which no boat can pass. These rapids were named by Livingstone the Murchison Cataracts, and they extend for seventy miles. This distance, accordingly, must be traversed overland. Half-way up this seventy miles, and a considerable distance inland from the river, stands the first white settlement in East Central Africa—the Blantyre Mission. Bribing about a hundred natives with a promise of a fathom of calico each, to carry our luggage, we set off on foot for Blantyre. The traditional characteristics of African caravaning were displayed in full perfection during this first experience, and darkness fell when we were but half-way to our destination. It was our first night in the bush, and a somewhat unusual introduction to African travelling marked it. At midnight we were roused by startling cries from our men, who lay sleeping on the ground around us. The watch-fires must have burned down, for a lion had suddenly sprung into the camp. Seizing the man who lay nearest the forest, the animal buried its claws in his breast, and was making off into the darkness, when the shouting frightened it and made it drop its prey. Twice during the night the lion came back, and we whites had to keep watch by turns till morning with loaded rifles. This is altogether an exceptional case, for with a good fire one can generally spread his mat anywhere in the tropics without fear of midnight attack. This is a famous place, however, for lions, and one can as certainly depend on their gruesome concert in the early morning as on the sparrows' chirp in England.

Towards sunset the following evening our caravan filed into Blantyre. On the beauty and interest of this ideal mission I shall not dwell. But if anyone wishes to find out what can be done with the virgin African, what can be done by broad and practical missionary methods, let him visit the Rev. D. Clement Scott and his friends at Blantyre. And if he wishes to observe the possibilities of civilization and colonization among an average African tribe living on an average African soil, let him examine the mission plantations, and those of Mr. John and Mr. Frederick Moir at Mandala, and of the Brothers Buchanan at Zomba. And, further, if he desires to know what the milk of human kindness is, let him time his attack of fever so that haply it may coincide with his visit to either of these centres of self-denying goodness and hospitality.