Nyassa, but to avoid the certainty of seeing all my
attendants bolting at the first sight of, the wild tribes
there, the Nindi, I changed off to go round the south end,
and if not, cross the middle. What I feared for the north
took place in the south when the Johanna men heard of the
Mazitu, though we were 150 miles from the marauders, and I
offered to go due west till past their beat. They were
terrified, and ran away as soon as they saw my face turned
west. I got carriers from village to village, and got on
nicely with people who had never engaged in the slave-trade;
but it was slow work. I came very near to the Mazitu three
times, but obtained information in time to avoid them. Once
we were taken for Mazitu ourselves, and surrounded by a
crowd of excited savages. They produced a state of confusion
and terror, and men fled hither and thither with the fear of
death on them. Casembe would not let me go into his southern
district till he had sent men to see that the Mazitu, or, as
they are called in Lunda, the Watuta, had left. Where they
had been all the food was swept off, and we suffered cruel
hunger. We had goods to buy with, but the people had nothing
to sell, and were living on herbs and mushrooms. I had to
feel every step of the way, and generally was groping in the
dark. No one knew anything beyond his own district, and who
cared where the rivers ran? Casembe said, when I was going to
Lake Bangweolo: 'One piece of water was just like another (it
is the Bangweolo water), but as your chief desired you to
visit that one, go to it. If you see a traveling party going
north, join it. If not, come back to me and I will send you
safely along my path by Moero;' and gave me a man's load of a
fish like whitebait. I gradually gained more light on the
country, and slowly and surely saw the problem of the
fountains of the Nile developing before my eyes. The vast
volume of water draining away to the north made me conjecture
that I had been working at the sources of the Congo too. My
present trip to Manyuema proves that all goes to the river of
Egypt. In fact, the head-waters of the Nile are gathered into
two or three arms, very much as was depicted by Ptolemy in
the second century of our era. What we moderns can claim is
rediscovery