ul tongue, began. {1}

Very curious are the effects of African fever on certain minds.
Cheerfulness vanishes, and the whole mental horizon is overcast with
black clouds of gloom and sadness. The liveliest joke cannot provoke
even the semblance of a smile. The countenance is grave, the eyes
suffused, and the few utterances are made in the piping voice of a
wailing infant. An irritable temper is often the first symptom of
approaching fever. At such times a man feels very much like a fool, if
he does not act like one. Nothing is right, nothing pleases the fever-
stricken victim. He is peevish, prone to find fault and to contradict,
and think himself insulted, and is exactly what an Irish naval surgeon
before a court-martial defined a drunken man to be: "a man unfit for
society."

Finding that it was impossible to take our steamer of only ten-horse
power through Kebrabasa, and convinced that, in order to force a passage
when the river was in flood, much greater power was required, due
information was forwarded to Her Majesty's Government, and application
made for a more suitable vessel. Our attention was in the mean time
turned to the exploration of the river Shire, a northern tributary of the
Zambesi, which joins it about a hundred miles from the sea. We could
learn nothing satisfactory from the Portuguese regarding this affluent;
no one, they said, had ever been up it, nor could they tell whence it
came. Years ago a Portuguese expedition is said, however, to have
attempted the ascent, but to have abandoned it on account of the
impenetrable duckweed (_Pistia stratiotes_.) We could not learn from any
record that the Shire had ever been ascended by Europeans. As far,
therefore, as we were concerned, the exploration was absolutely new. All
the Portuguese believed the Manganja to be brave but bloodthirsty
savages; and on our return we found that soon after our departure a
report was widely spread that our temerity had been followed by fatal
results, Dr. Livingstone having been shot, and Dr. Kirk mortally wounded
by poisoned arrows.

Our first trip to the Shire was in January, 1859. A considerable
quantity of weed floated down the river for the first twenty-five miles,
but not sufficient to interrupt navigation with canoes or with any other
craft. Nearly the whole of this aquatic plant proceeds from a marsh on
the west, and comes into the river a little beyond a lofty hill called
Mount Morambala. Above that th