The Sun.
London, England, 1857-12-25 00:00:00

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Itree, which effectually deters all thieves. When a
female chieftain, who received the travellers very
hospitably, was about to cross a stream, her confi-
dential doctor, who was in close attendance with
his basket of "medicines," waved some charms
over her before she ventured on the water. One of
the Makololo talked rather loudly in the immediate
neighbourhood of this basket, and was reproved for
it by the wizard, who himself always spoke in a low
voice, glancing back to the sacred package as if in
fear of being heard by something inside it. The
relative rank of the sexes, too, is quite reversed.
Sebituane, the Makololo chief, had intended his
daughter and successor to treat the men of his tribe
as he had treated the women, and select a husband
for herself at her own discretion. But this was so
opposed to Bechuana habits of feeling that the in-
dividual selected was actually called her wife ; and
the annoyances arising out of the popular criticism
of this anomalous relation operated powerfully in
inducing the lady to abdicate in favour of her
brother Sekeletu. But among the Balonda female
lordship is the most natural of ideas ; it seems to
prevail all across Central Africa north of the
Zambesi. When Dr. Livingstone reached the neigh-
bourhood
of the Portuguese settlement on the 1

eastern coast he had bargained with a native to be

his guide in consideration for a hoe. Unfortunately
the man went to show it to his wife, and presently
returned, saying she would IN let him leave her.
" :Then bring back the hoe," said the doctor. " No,
I want it." " Then go with us and you shall have
it." " But my wife won't let me." One of the party
who followed him, to his but heard him say to her,
" Do you think I would ever leave you 1" and then,
turning to his visitor, "Do you think I would ever
leave this pretty woman? Is she not pretty? Un-
happily this high estimation of the fairer sex, al-
though it deprives the Teutonic races of their claim
to the monopoly of gallantry, is not accompanied
by any other of the characteristics of civilisation.
The chief who exercises a supremacy over the whole
of the Balondaunder the name of Mutiamvo, whose
residence is at Cazembe (a town laid down from
the reports of native traders somewhere about lat.
10 30, and long. 27), appears to be one of the moat
reckless of despots, scarcely, if all, removed from the
character of an absolute maniac. This, at least, was
the cafe with the individual who died just before
the expedition of our traveller. He had a whim
sometimes of running a-muck in his town and be-
heading all he met until he had quite a heap of
human heads. Occasionally, when he was supposed
to need some special charm, a man was slaughtered
for the sake of a particular part of his body. If he
took a fancy to anything in the possession of a
stranger, he would order a whole village to be
brought up in order to purchase it by the sale of the
people. Frequently when a slave trader came he
would take possession of all his goods, and then,
after 10 days or a fortnight, send out a party who
pounced upon some considerable villages, killed the
headman, and paid for the goods by selling all the
inhabitants. These slave merchants were invari-
ably themselves me❑ of colour, generally half-caste
Po tuguese.
From the time of their leaving the Lecambye the
course of the travellers was northwards until arriving
at Lake Dilolo(lat 11 deg 33 min, long 22 deg 27 min).
Thence their mute took a westerly direction, and iu
its general bearing continued W.N. W. all the way
to St. Paul de Loanda, on the shore of the Atlantic.
The goal was reached on May 31, arid by the suc-
cessful achievement of the first part of his perilous
undertaking Dr. Livingstone was enabled to do for
the geography of South Tropical Africa what his
illustrious fellow-labourer in the field of science,
Dr. Barth, had done nearly contemporaneously for
the northern portion of the torrid zone. Both have

demonstrated- that where mountains were tradition-

ally balieved to exist there is in reality a widely de-
veloped system of rivers, which afford fair promise
of access to the interior of the country. Lake Dilolo

just mentioned, is most singularly placed. It is a
natural summit reservoir in the midst of an exten-

sive plain, which its.llf forms the watershed sepa-
rating the affluents of the Lecambye, or Zambesi,
from a portion of the headwaters of the Congo. Its
elevation above the sea level is no more than 4,000
feet, and yet, while from its southern eltromity
there proceeds one of the feeders of the great river
which fells into the Indian Ocean, there issues from
the northern end a stream which is an important
tributary of the Casai, a river that, after receiving
many contributions, unites its water with another
of equal magnitude (the Quango) flowing north-
wards; and the two, after a considerable course,
during which they receive a further accession of
waters from the equatorial regions, at last pour
their united stream into the Atlantic, under the
name of the Congo or Zaire.
Such an achievement as that of which we have
given a sketch was not to be performed without
much suffering. The elevated plains through which
the Doctor passed were all flooded by the periodical
rains, and he was constantly wet through. One attack
of fever followed another, and at the time hereached
Loanda he was more dead than alive, iu spite of the
greatest attention on the part of the Portuguese
settlers for the last mouth of his journey. The Ma-
kololo who had accompanied him were treated with
no less kindness than himself. Their remarks on

what they saw were extremely curious. The sea,
of course, struck them with amazement. "We
believed," said i hey, " that what the ancients had
toad us was true, that the world had no end ; but
all at once the world said to us, lam finished ;
ihereris no more of me.'" A house with two stories

had always been inconceivable to them. The nearest
point to which they had arrived was the notion of

two huts one on the top of the other, and they had
then felt puzzled to conceive how men could live

in the upper story with the conical roof of the lower

one in the 'Piddle. In describing a house of the
Doctor's they said, " It is not a but ; it is a moun-

tain with several caves in it." An English brig-of-
war was in the harbour, and they were invited on
board and allowed to fire off a cannon, Dr. Living-
ston " improving" the. occasion by telling them,
" That was what the English put down the slave
trade with." They were also taken to the service

iu the church, and remarked, " that they had eeen
the white men charming their demons, a phrase

identical with one they had used on -seeing the
pagan ritual of the Balonda.
Dr. Livingston returned to Linyanti by the way
he had come, with the exception of making a detour
in a part of the central plain in order to avoid some
of the chiefs who had treated him very ill on his

way out. He arrived there in October, 1855, after
an absence of nearly two years, during which he had
undergone 27 attacks of fever, and perils both from
man and wild animalS. One of the greatest of the
latter befell him just before his arrival in the terri-
tory of the friendly chief Sekeletu. He had got
quite out of the way of shooting, but his party
having been for a long time without animal food,
they landed from their canoe one day with the de-
termination on his part of getting so close that he

should not miss. The game was a zebra, and he
unfortunately only broke one of the hind legs, the
loss of which did nothinder the animal from going
off in a gallop, followed by his men. The rest of
the story shall be told in his own words :
"As I walked slowly after the men on an extensive
plain covered with a great crop of grass which was laid
by its own weight, I observed that a solitary buffalo,
disturbed by others of my own party, was coming to me
at a gallop. I glanced around, but the only tree on the
plain was a hundred yards off, and there was no escape
elsewhere. I therefore cocked my rifle with the inten-
tion of giving him a steady shot in the forehead, when
he should come within three or four yards of me. The
thought flashed across my mind, What if your gun
misses fire ?' I placed it to my shoulder as he came on
at full speed, and that is tremendous, though generally
he is a lumbering looking animal in his paces. A small
bush and bunch of grass 15 yards off, made him swerve
a little and expose his shoulder. I just heard the ball
crack there, as I fell flat on my face. The pain roust
have made him renounce his purpose, for he bounded
close past mo on to the water, where he was found
dead."

There now remained, in order to complete the
task which Dr. Livingstone had imposed upon him-
self, the comparatively easy achievement of ex-
ploring the course of the Zambesi eastward to the
sea. He left Linyanti for this purpose on the 3d
of November, and arrived in safety, although again
weakened by fever, in the Portuguese settlement
of Tete early in the following February. The at-
tention he received from the authorities here was
equal to that which he had experienced on the west
coast. By their kind aid he was enabled to reach
Quilimane, although in miserable plight from the
effects of long-continued fatigue and privation
upon his health, on the 20th of May, 1856, and to
reap the glory of having, first of any European,
traversed tropical Africa from shore to shore.
Our space prevents us from giving even a sketch of
this last journey, but there was one portion in
it which must be noticed. Important as the
navigation of the Zambesi is for commercial in-
tercourse with Central Africa, there are several
points at which an interruption occurs from
rapids, which render the transshipment of goods
a necessity. At one of these the obstacle is
caused by a wonderful cataract, which, putting
all circumstances together, is probably the most
L astonishing natural phenomenon in the world. The
whole river, which at the time the Doctor paw it was