Page:Littell's Living Age - Volume 125.djvu/93

 own territory. Against this fixed determination all their efforts failed, and on April 12, 1870, the traders and the traveller left the royal residence, taking the little Tikkitikki with them, who, little savage that he was, howled awfully, not, as Schweinfurth thought, at parting with his family, but because he was quite sure they were only taking him with them to kill and eat him by the way. As soon as he was reassured on this point, and found that he was fed on the best of everything, he became quite resigned, and went on overeating himself till he died.

On their return to the north, the travellers found it not so easy to get out of the Monbuttoo country as into it. As soon as they reached Wando's country they found him as implacable as ever, and for some time they had to fight their way through a hostile country, Aboo Sammat himself receiving a dangerous wound, in spite of which he continued to show the most determined bravery. When they had defeated Wando, Schweinfurth was left at the seriba on Nabambasso for some weeks while the Nubian was adjusting further differences with the natives sword in hand; and then the starvation which Ghattas' people had predicted nearly overtook him. Visions of pale ale and beefsteaks rose before his disordered vision, as they had done to Baker's, and had it not been for the unctuous insects in a great ant-hill which they devoured fried, they would not have been able to keep body and soul together. At length the rains fell and the roots grew, and the Nubian returned victorious from his campaign. Then they made another start north, and, passing through Nganye's friendly country, though again suffering from hunger, they crossed the Tondy on a rude suspension bridge, and Schweinfurth at last arrived at the seriba of Kulongo on the borders of Ghattas' country, whence he had started with Aboo Sammat eight months before. This was in July 1870, and there, after completing his journals and arranging his collections, our traveller was on the eve of beginning another journey into the Niam Niam country — where we may observe that he would most certainly have perished, and as probably been eaten, since the whole expedition was cut off — when a terrible calamity overtook him, and rendered him powerless to penetrate farther into Central Africa. From Kulongo Schweinfurth had moved to Ghattas' head seriba, where he had spent so much time the year before, and here, on December 1, 1870, a conflagration broke out which consumed the whole camp.


 * I had saved little beyond my life [he says]; I had lost all my clothes, my guns, and the best part of my instruments. I was without tea and without quinine. … All my preparations for my projected expedition; all the produce of my recent journey; all the entomological collections that I had made; all my examples of native industry; all my registers of meteorological events, in which I had inscribed some 7,000 barometrical observations; all my journals with the detailed narrative of the transactions of 825 days; all my measurements of the natives, and all my vocabularies; everything was gone in a single hour, the plunder of the flames.

It was indeed fortunate that a great part of his anatomical and botanical collections had been already despatched to Europe, and that science has been thus immeasurably enriched by the discoveries of this accomplished naturalist; but it is no less heart-rending to imagine the position of such a man, so full of energy and devotion to science, standing alone, as it were, in Central Africa, without shoes, or clothes, or arms, or ammunition, or instruments, or even paper to preserve his specimens; without a watch to reckon the time, or a barometer to register the weather. Many a man would have sunk under such a calamity; but Schweinfurth was equal to the occasion. Amid the ruins of his hut he discovered ink and the materials for writing and drawing. He soon made up his mind that the footsteps of a man are a much more accurate standard of measurement than those of a beast, and for the remainder of his travels he carefully counted his steps, and ascertained with a patience which none but a German would have exhibited, that in the six months during which he remained in Africa, before he re-embarked at the pestilential Meshera, he had made a million and a quarter of steps. On his travels during that period we will not dwell. They afforded him abundant proof of the fact that in those regions the institution of slavery was indigenous, and not to be extirpated by any one expedition of a reluctant government, or by stopping up one branch of the Nile to the traders who find it so profitable. We shall return, farther on, to the consideration of this question. As a traveller devoted to science, Schweinfurth took things as he found them, and made the best and the most of them. He is loud in his abhorrence of slavery, yet he had slaves as his 