Into Africa: The Epic Adventures of Stanley & Livingstone (39 page)

That was the case as Stanley’s men pushed out of the woodlands. They had four days’ worth of provisions to reach the Malagarasi River, a wide, powerful flow that fed Lake Tanganyika. Reaching the Malagarasi would be a symbol that their dangerous journey was almost complete.

The problem, however, was that the country was getting too rugged for rapid travel. ‘The scenery was getting more and more sublime every day as we advanced northwards, even approaching the terrible. We seemed to have left the monotony of a desert for the wild, picturesque scenery of Abyssinia and the terrible mountains of the Sierra Nevadas,’ Stanley wrote.

After four days, the Malagarasi was nowhere in sight. The caravan’s mood turned quiet. Many of the men were so weak they lacked the strength to talk. Stanley compared it with being shipwrecked. ‘Bleached and bare,’ he wrote of the landscape, ‘it was cut up by a thousand deep ravines and intersected with a thousand dry water courses whose beds were filled with immense sandstone rocks and boulders washed away from the great heights.’ Their only food was the peach-like mbembu they had collected by the bagful. The fruit gave them energy and fibre, but the lack of protein brought forth a breakdown in muscle mass and rapid weight loss. The over-abundance of fructose caused an osmotic pull within their bodies, giving rise to severe
watery diarrhoea. And that, as the fluids gushed precipitously from their bodies, also brought about dehydration.

There was no more forest to protect them from the heat, and no water sources with which to replenish the lost fluids. Their dehydration grew worse. Thirst ravaged every man. As the crow flew, the New York
Herald
expedition was less than a hundred miles from Ujiji. But with the daunting landscape and their pace slowed by lack of food and water, it might as well have been a thousand.

Stanley pressed the march, sure that the Malagarasi was just over the next ridge. But instead of finding relief, the party found the terrain more and more rugged and geometric — rounded cones of sandstone, loose haematite underfoot, fissures and pyramids of red ochre, long narrow deep ravines with disintegrating rock overhead. There was no vegetation. The soldiers prayed to Allah for relief and lions roared outside camp in the night. Stanley took solace in the notion that, while the caravan’s situation was dire, there had been few moments since leaving the coast when it had not been so.

On 29 October, five weeks since leaving Tabora and their seventh day without food, the caravan came upon the deserted remains of a village. A jungle stream flowed nearby. In the shade of a giant sycamore Stanley ordered a halt. ‘The people were very hungry. They had eaten every scrap of meat, and every grain they possessed,’ Stanley wrote, ‘and there were no prospects for food. I had but one pound and a half of flour left, and this would not have sufficed to begin to feed a force of over forty-five people. But I had something like thirty pounds of tea, and twenty pounds of sugar left. And I at once, as soon as we arrived at camp, ordered every kettle to be filled and placed on the fire, and then made tea for all, giving each man a quart of hot, grateful beverage.’

Africa taunted them as they rose before dawn and began the desperate search for food. Rhino tracks and buffalo droppings were everywhere, but there was no sight of any living thing. Their descent down the watershed
continued, though instead of vast chasms they were travelling down short steep gullies. The air began to get humid as the terrain took on a greenish hue, and Stanley knew water was close. Two more hours of hiking led them into a long lush valley, with a forest at the far end. Most wondrous of all, the trail took the caravan into the midst of a cornfield. The stalks were bare, but the field’s presence meant a village was near. Desperately scanning the ridge-line for some sign of life, Stanley spotted fortifications on top of a nearby mountain. And even before he could make camp and send men upwards with bales for trade, the villagers were rushing down to the expedition laden with meat and grain. Stanley broke out the cloth. Soon ‘the men’s jaws’, Stanley noted with relief, ‘were busy in the process of mastication’.

The chief of the village, however, was a sharp trader. His name was Rusunzu. His isolated location left him few opportunities to showcase his skill, but he more than made up for that by extorting as much cloth from Stanley as possible. During an afternoon of haggling, Rusunzu demanded ten doti for the amount of food Stanley purchased. Stanley was ferocious in his refusal. Rusunzu then stated that the cloth wasn’t to pay for the food, but tribute for the privilege of continuing through his land.

Stanley had a hard time arguing with that. But he was also running out of cloth, and even small tribute payments needed to be avoided whenever possible. By the end of the day, worn down by Rusunzu’s haggling, Stanley agreed to pay seven and a half doti. When it was learned that two tribes were at war in the swampy morass between the village and the Malagarasi, Stanley was also forced to hire two of Rusunzu’s men as guides in order to show him an alternative route.

It was 31 October when Stanley travelled onwards again. In America, Cochise and his Apache warriors were being hunted in the Arizona Territory, Chicago had just been destroyed by fire, and President Grant was about to issue a proclamation making the Ku Klux Klan illegal. In England, Darwin’s
Descent of Man
was just days away
from publication. In Paris, the first exhibition of impressionist painting was about to get under way. If Stanley were back in the world, he would likely have been covering one of those events for the
Herald
with great gusto and self-importance. But those happenings were just the peripheral sounds of a civilization trying to make sense of itself compared with Stanley’s ongoing need to find food and water for himself and his men. His focus was on surviving, not embellishing his existence.

Marching east north-east, the expedition came upon a broad green meadow framed by sheer cliffs. But as they got closer, they found a phenomenon unlike anything any expedition member had encountered. The ‘meadow’ wasn’t land at all. It was a vast bridge of vegetation formed by thick swamp grasses that had knitted together. Beneath the bridge flowed a black river a mile wide and of unknown depth. As Stanley and his men wondered how in the world they were going to get forty-five expedition members plus laden donkeys across, the guides didn’t help matters by pointing out that the bridge of vegetation had once collapsed as a traveller was passing through. The traveller, his donkey, thirty-five slaves and sixteen tusks of ivory fell into the crocodile-filled river and were never seen again.

Stanley stayed back to make sure all of his men found the courage to cross. He marvelled at the odd shapes the grass took when men and material passed over — undulating wave-like in some spots, while another section looked ‘like a small lake buffeted by a squall’. More ominous, as Stanley took his first tentative steps onto the grass it sank until water rose above his ankles. The river, it seemed, was not as far below as Stanley had thought.

Carefully, slowly, the New York
Herald
expedition crossed to the other side. He bought goats from a village nearby and slaughtered eight that night in celebration. A week after they supposed they would find it, the Malagarasi was still nowhere to be seen. Stanley sensed, however, that it was getting near.

They came upon the river the next morning. Villages
lined its banks, and fish-eating birds could be seen in the shallows. The Malagarasi, it turned out, wasn’t a particularly wide river, but it was deep and filled with so many crocodiles that their heads dotted the surface as far as the eye could see. The men and material would have to be ferried across. Knowing this, the local sultan, Nzogera, demanded so much cloth that Stanley feared he would become bankrupt. Fifty-six doti were demanded by Nzogera, and only for the privilege of passing through his land. The cost of ferrying the expedition by canoe was extra. Stanley refused to pay. He sent Bombay and Asmani to negotiate with the Sultan.

All through the night of 1 November, Bombay and Asmani argued. No sooner would an agreement be made and payment be extended, than the Sultan would find another reason to demand payment. Ultimately, Stanley had to pay almost an entire bale of cloth to Nzogera — and still he had to pay the owners of the small canoes that would ferry the expedition across the river, four men to a boat. More beads and cloth were doled out. The river men, after taking one group of men across, then demanded another payment for returning to ferry a second group. After that payment was made, the process continued each of the three times the canoes ferried men across. Finally, at sunset, almost everyone was across except the two donkeys. They would cross one at a time. Knowing they wouldn’t fit in the canoes, Stanley’s men would sit in the canoe holding the donkey by a halter as the animal swam alongside. The first donkey to attempt the crossing was a favourite of Stanley’s, a wild Kinyamwezi named Simba — ‘lion’ in Swahili. Halfway across, Stanley was horrified to see Simba attacked on the throat by a swarm of crocodiles. Even as Stanley’s men fought to drag Simba across the river, the crocodiles clamped down hard on the donkey’s face and neck, then dragged it under. Simba never kicked its way back to the surface, never fought free of the crocodile. It simply slipped under and was never seen again. ‘We had seen the light-brown heads, the glittering eyes and the ridgy backs,
hovering about the vicinity,’ a horrified Stanley wrote, ‘but we never thought the beast would advance so near such an exciting scene as the vicinity of the ferry during the crossing.’

The other donkey would go across with Bombay the next morning, a time when the crocodiles were traditionally absent from the river.

As they waited for dawn, an uncharacteristic wave of sadness swept over the caravan. Despite their fear and mutinies in the early days, the entire group — animals included — had endured Stanley’s wilderness together. The early tensions were being replaced by camaraderie. The end was near, or so it seemed. To watch the gruesome carnage of Simba’s death was a reminder that the same could happen to anyone at any time. That sadness stayed with them all night long.

The next morning, however, any trace of melancholy vanished. Stanley received confirmation that a white man was in Ujiji.

HIS PAIN THRESHOLD
was incredible and his endurance remarkable, but when Livingstone finally reached Lake Tanganyika on 8 October, his will was shattered. He wrote, simply, ‘I was reduced to a skeleton.’

The continued failure to complete his mission was breaking Livingstone. The Source had been left behind. His physical condition and the Arab-Manyuema hostilities meant he would not return any time soon — if ever. ‘The mind, sorely depressed, reacted on the body,’ he wrote on the lake’s bank. All around him slave and ivory traders were heading back to Ujiji, then on to Bagamoyo, crowing about their successful missions. ‘I alone had failed and experienced worry, thwarting, baffling, when almost in the sight of the end towards which I had strained.’

He set about finding a canoe for the paddle across to Ujiji, where his stores waited for him. He could purchase food, new shoes and new supplies. He would relax and regroup. After months of being dependent upon the Arabs, then after two long months trekking from Nyangwe to Lake Tanganyika, Livingstone would relish
not being beholden to anyone.

As had happened the last time, two years and eight months earlier, there were no stores waiting once Livingstone finally reached Ujiji. Sherif, an Arab trader and friend of Kirk’s, had picked through the calico and beads. Most appalling was Sherif’s unrepentant attitude. He adorned his slaves in fine clothes purchased with Livingstone’s goods. And Sherif ‘came without shame to shake hands with me, and, when I refused, assumed an air of displeasure as having been badly treated’. Sherif taunted Livingstone with a good luck salutation twice a day, until Livingstone had had enough. ‘If I were an Arab,’ the venerable Scot swore to Sherif, ‘I would have your hand and both ears cut off for thieving.’

Sherif had given the explorer a wide berth after that, but it didn’t matter. Livingstone was destitute. He faced either becoming a beggar or starving to death, and he simply refused to align himself with the Arabs again or rely on their charity. After the massacre, they couldn’t be trusted. And though they came to him and offered gifts of ivory for him to sell, Livingstone turned them down. He spent his days in Ujiji inside his small house, praying for deliverance and mentally preparing for the day his food would run out and he would be reduced to begging. He could see the lake clearly, with the fishing boats travelling out each dusk and returning home at dawn. ‘I made up my mind to wait until men should come from the coast,’ he had written in the hope that the British Consul would send more supplies from Zanzibar. ‘But to wait in beggary was what I never contemplated, and now I felt miserable.’

Livingstone had finally admitted something he’d never admitted before: he needed rescuing.