Chapter 16

We at last reached a spot where, by climbing the highest tree, we could see a fine large sheet of water, surrounded on all sides by an impenetrable belt of reeds. This was the river Chobe, and is called Zambesi. We struggled through the high, serrated grass, the heat stifling for want of air, and when we reached one of the islands, my strong moleskins were worn through at the knees, and the leather trousers of my companion were torn, and his legs bleeding. The Makololo said in their figurative language: "He has dropped among us from the clouds, yet came riding on the back of a hippopotamus. We Makololo thought no one could cross the Chobe without our knowledge, but here he drops among us like a bird."

On our arrival at Linyanti, the capital, the chief, Sekelutu, took me aside and pressed me to mention those things I liked best and hoped to get from him. Anything either in or out of the town should be freely given if I would only mention it. I explained to him that my object was to elevate him and his people to be Christians; but he replied that he did not wish to learn to read the Book, for he was afraid "it might change his heart and make him content with one wife like Sechele." I liked the frankness of Sekelutu, for nothing is so wearying to the spirit as talking to those who agree with everything advanced.

While at Linyanti I was taken with fever, from chills caught by leaving my warm wagon in the evening to conduct family worship at my people's fires. Anxious to ascertain whether the natives possessed the knowledge of any remedy, I sent for one of their doctors. He put some roots into a pot with water, and when it was boiling, placed it beneath a blanket thrown around both me and it. This produced no effect, and after being stewed in their vapour baths, smoked like a red-herring over green twigs, and charmed _secundem artem_, I concluded I could cure my fever more quickly than they could.

Leaving Linyanti, we passed up the Lecambye river into the Barotse country, and on making inquiries whether Santuru, the Moloiana, had ever been visited by white men, I could find no vestige of any such visit before my arrival in 1851.

In our ascent up the River Leeba, we reached the village of Manenko, a female chief, of whose power of tongue we soon had ample proof. She was a woman of fine physique, and insisted on accompanying us some distance with her husband and drummer, the latter thumping most vigorously, until a heavy, drizzling mist set in and compelled him to desist. Her husband used various incantations and vociferations to drive away the rain, but down it poured incessantly, and on our Amazon went, in the very lightest marching order, and at a pace that few men could keep up with. Being on ox-back, I kept pretty close to our leader, and asked her why she did not clothe herself during the rain, and learnt that it is not considered proper for a chief to appear effeminate. My men, in admiration of her pedestrian powers, every now and then remarked, "Manenko is a soldier!" Thoroughly wet and cold, we were all glad when she proposed a halt to prepare for our night's lodging on the banks of a stream.

_III.--Peril and Patience_

When we arrived at the foot of the Kasai we were badly in want of food, and there seemed little hope of getting any; one of our guides, however, caught a light-blue mole and two mice for his supper. Katende, the chief, sent for me the following morning, and on my walking into his hut I was told that he wanted a man, a tusk, beads, copper rings, and a shell as payment for leave to pass through his country. Having humbly explained our circumstances and that he could not expect to "catch a humble cow by the horns"--a proverb similar to ours that "You cannot draw milk out of a stone"--we were told to go home, and he would speak to us next day. I could not avoid a hearty laugh at the cool impudence of the savage. Eventually I sent him one of my worst shirts, but added that when I should reach my own chief naked, and was asked what I had done with my clothes, I should be obliged to confess I had left them with Katende.

Passing onwards, we crossed a small rivulet, the Sengko, and another and larger one with a bridge over it. At the farther end of this structure stood a negro who demanded fees. He said the bridge was his, the guides were his children, and if we did not pay him, he would prevent further progress. This piece of civilisation I was not prepared to meet, and stood a few seconds looking at our bold toll-keeper, when one of our men took off three copper bracelets, which paid for the whole party. The negro was a better man than he at first seemed, for he immediately went into his garden and brought us some leaves of tobacco as a present.

We were brought to a stand on the banks of the Loajima, a tributary of the Kasai, by the severity of my fever, being in a state of partial coma, until late at night, I found we were in the midst of enemies; and the Chiboque natives insisting upon a present, I had to give them a tired-out ox. Later on we marched through the gloomy forest in gloomier silence; the thick atmosphere prevented my seeing the creeping plants in time to avoid them; I was often caught, and as there is no stopping the oxen when they have the prospect of giving the rider a tumble, came frequently to the ground. In addition to these mishaps, my ox Sinbad went off at a plunging gallop, the bridle broke, and I came down behind on the crown of my head. He gave me a kick in the thigh at the same time. I felt none the worse for this rough treatment, but would not recommend it to others as a palliative in cases of fever.

We shortly afterwards met a hostile party of natives, who refused us further passage. Seeing that these people had plenty of iron-headed arrows and some guns, I called a halt, and ordered my men to put the luggage in the centre in case of actual attack. I then dismounted, and advancing a little towards our principal opponent, showed him how easily I could kill him, but pointed upwards, saying, "I fear God." He did the same, placing his hand on his heart, pointing upwards, and saying, "I fear to kill, but come to our village; come, do come."

During these exciting scenes I always forgot my fever, but a terrible sense of sinking came back with the feeling of safety. These people stole our beads, and though we offered all our ornaments and my shirts, they refused us passage. My men were so disheartened that they proposed a return home, which distressed me exceedingly. After using all my powers of persuasion, I declared to them that if they returned, I would go on alone, and went into my little tent with the mind directed to Him Who hears the sighing of the soul, and was soon followed by the head of Mohorisi, saying, "We will never leave you. Do not be disheartened. Wherever you lead, we will follow. Our remarks were made only on account of the injustice of these people."

We were soon on the banks of the Quango, and after some difficulties reached the opposite bank.

The village of Cassenge is composed of thirty or forty traders' houses on an elevated flat spot in the great Quango, or Cassenge, valley. As I always preferred to appear in my own proper character, I was an object of curiosity to the hospitable Portuguese. They evidently looked upon me as an agent of the English government, engaged in some new movement for the suppression of slavery. They could not divine what a "missionario" had to do with the latitudes and longitudes which I was intent on observing.

On coming across the plains to Loanda we first beheld the sea; my companions looked upon the boundless ocean with awe. In describing their feelings afterwards they remarked, "We marched along with our father thinking that what the ancients had always told us was true, that the world has no end, but all at once the world said to us, 'I am finished, there is no more of me.'"

Here in this city, among its population of 12,000 souls there was but one genuine English gentleman, who bade me welcome, and seeing me ill, benevolently offered me his bed. Never shall I forget the luxuriant pleasure I enjoyed feeling myself again on a good English couch, after six months sleeping on the ground.

_IV.--Into the Wilderness Again_

For the sake of my Makololo companions I refused the tempting offer of a passage home in one of her majesty's cruisers.

During my journey through Angola I received at Cassenge a packet of the "Times" from home with news of the Russian war up to the terrible charge of the light cavalry. The intense anxiety I felt to hear more may be imagined by every true patriot.

After leaving the Kasai country, we entered upon a great level plain, which we had formerly found in a flooded condition. We forded the Lotembwa on June 8, and found that the little Lake Dilolo, by giving a portion to our Kasai and another to the Zambesi, distributes its waters to the Atlantic and Indian oceans. From information derived from Arabs at Zanzibar, whom I met at Naliele in the middle of the country, a large shallow lake is pointed out in the region east of Loanda, named Tanganyenka, which requires three days in crossing in canoes. It is connected with another named Kalagwe (Garague?), farther north, and may be the Nyanja of the Maravim.

Although I was warned that the Batoka tribe would be hostile, I decided on going down the Zambesi, and on my way I visited the falls of Victoria, called by the natives Mosioatunya, or more anciently, Shongwe. No one can imagine the beauty of the view from anything witnessed in England. It has never been seen before by European eyes, but scenes so lovely must have been gazed upon by angels in their flight. Five columns of "smoke" arose, bending in the direction of the wind. The entire falls is simply a crack made in a hard basaltic rock from the right to the left bank of the Zambesi, and then prolonged from the left bank away through thirty or forty miles of hills. The whole scene was extremely beautiful; the banks and islands dotted over the river are adorned with sylvan vegetation of great variety of colour and form. At the period of our visit several of the trees were spangled over with blossoms.

In due time we reached the confluence of the Loangwa and the Zambesi, most thankful to God for His great mercies in helping us thus far. I felt some turmoil of spirit in the evening at the prospect of having all my efforts for the welfare of this great region and its teeming population knocked on the head by savages to-morrow, who might be said to "know not what they do."

When at last we reached within eight miles of Tete I was too fatigued to go on, but sent the commandant the letters of recommendation of the bishop and lay down to rest. Next morning two officers and some soldiers came to fetch us, and when I had partaken of a good breakfast, though I had just before been too tired to sleep, all my fatigue vanished. The pleasure of that breakfast was enhanced by the news that Sebastopol had fallen and the war finished.

PIERRE LOTI

The Desert

_I.--Arabia Deserta_

Pierre Loti, whose real name is Louis Marie Julien Viaud, and who has made his whole career in the French navy, was born at Rochefort on January 14, 1850. Distinguished though his naval activities have been, it is as a man of letters that Pierre Loti is known to the world. His first production, "Aziyade," appeared in 1876, and gave ample promise of that style, borrowed from no one and entirely his own, which has since characterized all his works. "The Desert," published in 1894, is a masterpiece of a peculiarly modern kind. Loti leaves to other writers the task of depicting the Bedouin. The spectacle of nature in her wildest and severest mood was what he went out to see; and he employs all the resources of his incomparable genius for description in painting the vacant immensity of the Arabian wilderness. Tired and distracted by the whirl and fever of life in Paris, Loti set out, like Tancred, in Beaconsfield's romance on a pilgrimage from Sinai to Calvary to recover the faith he had lost in civilisation.

_February 22, 1894._ All about us was the empty infinitude; the twilight desert swept by a great cold wind; the desert that rolled, in dull, dead colours, under a still more sombre sky which, on the circular horizon, seemed to fall on it and crush it.

Sitting under the palm-tree of the Oasis of Moses, half an hour's march from the Red Sea, surrounded by our camels and camel-men, we stared at the desert, and the emotion and the ecstasy of solitude came over us. We longed to plunge headlong into the dim, luring immensity, to run with the wind blowing over the desolate dunes. So we ran, and reaching the heights, we looked down on a larger wilderness, over which trailed a dying gleam of daylight, fallen from the yellow sky through a rent made by the wind in the cloudy veil. But so sinister was the desert in the winter wind, that from some remote, ancestral source of feeling a strange melancholy welled up and mingled with our desire for the solitude. In it was the instinctive fear which makes the sheep and cattle of the green lands retrace their steps at the sight of regions over which hangs the shadow of death.

But under our tent, lighted and sheltered from the wind, we recovered our gaiety of mood. There was the novelty of our first meal in the desert to excite us, and the pleasure of packing up our ridiculous European costumes, and dressing ourselves in the more useful and far more decorative burnous and veils of the sheiks of Arabia.

All the next three days we travelled through a waterless waste, following a vague trace which, in the course of ages, men and beasts have made in the dry sand. Far in front the sky-line danced in the heat. The sand around was strewn with greyish stones; everything was grey, grey-red or grey-yellow. Here and there was a plant of a pale green, with an imperceptible flower, and the long necks of the camels bent and stretched trying to crop it.

Little by little one's mind grows drowsy, lulled by the monotony of the slow, swinging movement of the tall, indefatigable camel. In the foreground of the grey scene, one's sleepy, lowered eyes see at last nothing but the continual undulation of its neck, of the same grey-yellow as the sand, and the back of its shaggy head, similar to the little head of a lion, encircled with a barbaric ornament of white shells and blue pearls, with hangings of black wool.

As we go on, the last signs of life disappear. There is not a bird, not an insect; even the flies which exist in all the lands of the earth are not found. While the deserts of the sea contain vital wealth in profusion, here are sterility and death. Yet one is intoxicated with the stillness and lifelessness of it all, and the air is pure and virginal, blowing from the world before the creation.

The wind drops, and in an atmosphere of an absolute purity the sun mounts and burns with a white fire. Under the dazzling light, one shuts one's eyes in spite of oneself for long periods. When one opens them, the horizon seems a black circle breaking on the brightness of the heavens, while the precise spot in which one is remains astonishingly white. Nothing sings, nothing flies, nothing stirs. The immense silence is dully broken only by the incessant, monotonous tread of our slow, swinging camels.

On the fourth day we leave the plain and strike into the mountainous solitudes of the Sinai peninsula.... As we ascend, vast new tracts are unrolled on all sides beneath our eyes, and the impression of the desert becomes more distressing by reason of this visible affirmation of its illimitableness. It is terrifying in its magnificence! The limpidity of the air gives an extraordinary depth to the perspectives, and in the clear and far-receding distances the chains of mountains are interlaced and overlaid in regular forms which, from the beginning of the world, have been untouched by the hand of man, and with hard, dry contours which no vegetation has ever softened or changed. In the foreground they are of a reddish brown; then in their flight to the sky-line they pass into a wonderful tone of violet, which grows bluer and bluer until it melts into the pure indigo of the extreme distance. And all this is empty, silent, and dead. It is the splendour of an invariable region, from which is absent the ephemeral beauty of forest, verdure, or herbage; the splendour of eternal matter, affranchised from all the instability of life; the geological splendour of the world before the creation.

Oh, the sunset this evening! Never have we seen so much gold poured out for us alone around our lonely camp. Our camels, wandering beyond our tents, and strangely enlarged against the vacant horizon, have gold on their heads, on their legs, on their long necks; they are all edged with gold.

And then night comes, the limpid night with its stillness. If at this moment one goes away from the camp and loses sight of it, or even separates oneself from the little handful of living creatures strayed in the midst of dead space, in order to feel more absolutely alone in the nocturnal vacancy, one has an impression of terror in which there is something religious. Less distant, less inaccessible than elsewhere, the stars blaze in the depths of the cosmic abysses; and in this desert, unchangeable and untouched by time, from which one looks at them, one feels oneself nearer to conceiving their inconceivable infinity; one has almost the illusion of sharing in their starry duration, their starry impassibility.

_II.--The Habitation of Solitude_

_March 1._ After climbing two days in snow, thunder, and tempest, we see at last, amid the dim, cloudy peaks of granite, the tall ramparts and the cypress trees of the convent of Sinai. Alas! how silent, sinister, and chill appears the holy mountain, whose name alone still flames for us in the distance. It is as empty as the sky above our heads.

Trembling with the cold in our thin, wet burnous, we alight from our camels, that suffer and complain, disquieted by the white obscurity, the lashing wind, the strange, wild altitude. For twenty minutes we clamber by lantern light among blocks and falls of granite, with bare feet that slip at every step on the snow. Then we reach a gigantic wall, the summit of which is lost in darkness, and a little low door, covered with iron, opens. We pass in. Two more doors of a smaller kind lead through a vaulted tunnel in the rampart. They close behind us with the clang of armour, and we creep up some flights of rough, broken stairs, hewed out of the rock, to a hostel for pilgrims at the top of the great fortress.

Some hospitable monks in black robes, and with long hair like women, hasten to cheer us with a little hot coffee and a little lighted charcoal, carried in a copper vase. Everything has an air of nonchalant wretchedness and Oriental dilapidation in this convent built by the Emperor Justinian fourteen centuries ago. Our bare, whitewashed bedrooms are like the humblest of Turkish dwellings, save for the modest icon above the divan, with a night-light burning before it. The little chamber is covered with the names of pilgrims gathered from the ends of the earth; Russian, Arabian, and Greek inscriptions predominate.

Aroused by a jet of clear sunlight, and surprised by the strangeness of the place, I ran to the balcony; there I still marvelled to find the fantastic things seen by glimpses last night, standing real and curiously distinct in the implacable white light, but arranged in an unreal way, as if inset into each other without perspective, so pure is the atmosphere--and all silent, silent as if they were dead of their extreme old age. A Byzantine church, a mosque, cots, cloisters, an entanglement of stairways, galleries, and arches falling to the precipices below: all this in miniature; built up in a tiny space; all this encompassed with formidable ramparts, and hooked on to the flanks of gigantic Sinai! From the sharpness and thinness of the air, we know that we are at an excessive height, and yet we seem to be at the bottom of a well. On every side the extreme peaks of Sinai enclose us, as they mount and scale the sky; their titanic walls, all of blood-red granite without stain or shadow, are so vertical and so high that they dizzy and appal. Only a fragment of the sky is visible, but its blueness is of a profound transparency, and the sun is magnificent. And still the same eerie silence envelops the phantom-like monastery, whose antiquity is accentuated under the cold, dazzling sunlight and the sparkling snow. One feels that it is verily "the habitation of solitude," encompassed by the great wildernesses.

Its situation has preserved it from the revolutions, the wars, and the changing fashions of the world. Almost everything remains just as it was built in 550 by Justinian. And when one of the long-haired monks shows us the marvellous treasures of the basilica--a dim, richly barbaric structure, filled with priceless offerings from the ancient kings of the earth--we no longer wonder at the enormous height and thickness of the ramparts which protect the convent from the Bedouins.

Behind the tabernacle of the basilica is the holy place of Sinai--the crypt of the "Burning Bush." It is a sombre cavern lined with antique tiles of a dim blue-green, which are hidden under the icons of gold and precious stone attached to the walls, and under the profusion of gold and silver lamps hanging from the low roof. Rigid saints in vermilion robes, whose faces are concealed in the dark shadow of their barbaric glistening crowns, looked at us as we entered. We stepped in reverently, on bare feet, and never, in any place, did we have so entire an impression of a recoil into the long past ages of the world.

Peoples and empires have passed away, while these precious things slowly tarnished in this dim crypt. Even the monk who accompanies us resembles, with his long red hair falling over his shoulders, and the pale beauty of his ascetic face, the mystics of the early ages; and his thoughts are infinitely removed from ours. And the vague reflection of sunlight which arrives through a single, little window in the thick wall, and falls in a circle of ghostly radiance on the icons and mosaics, seems to be some gleam from an ancient day, some gleam from an age far different from the sordid, impious century in which we live.

A kind of lodge, paved with chiselled silver, and hung with lighted lamps, rises in the depth of the crypt; it is there that, according to the venerated tradition, the _Angel of the Eternal_ appeared to Moses in the midst of the burning bush.

_III.--Where Nothing Changes_

_March 16._ We have now left the blue lonely waters and the red granite cliffs of the Gulf of Akaba, and entered the great desert of Tih, the solitudes of which, our camel-men say, are as immense and as flat as the sea, and the scene of incessant mirages. It is peopled by a few tribes of savage Bedouins, descended from the Amalekites. This is the land in which nothing changes: the true Orient, immutable in its dust and its dreams. Behind the barren hill on which we have camped, Arabia Deserta unrolls the infinite tract of its red desolation. On our right is the wild wilderness of Petra and the sinister mountains of the land of Edom. In front stretches the gloomier waste of the plateau of Tih.