s
heart and kept him firm to his purpose in such a wilderness of
desolation?

"I read the whole Bible through four times whilst I was in Manyuema."

So he wrote in his Diary, not at the time, but the year after, on the 3d
October, 1871[70]. The Bible gathers wonderful interest from the
circumstances in which it is read. In Livingstone's circumstances it was
more the Bible to him than ever. All his loneliness and sorrow, the
sickness of hope deferred, the yearnings for home that could neither be
repressed nor gratified, threw a new light on the Word. How clearly it
was intended for such as him, and how sweetly it came home to him! How
faithful, too, were its pictures of human sin and sorrow! How true its
testimony against man, who will not retain God in his knowledge, but,
leaving Him, becomes vain in his imaginations and hard in his heart,
till the bloom of Eden is gone, and a waste, howling wilderness spreads
around! How glorious the out-beaming of Divine Love, drawing near to
this guilty race, winning and cherishing them with every endearing act,
and at last dying on the cross to redeem them! And how bright the
closing scene of Revelation--the new heaven and the new earth wherein
dwelleth righteousness--yes, he can appreciate _that_ attribute--the
curse gone, death abolished, and all tears wiped from the mourner's eye!

[Footnote 70: See _Last Journals_, vol. ii. p. 154.]

So the lonely man in his dull hut is riveted to the well-worn book; ever
finding it a greater treasure as he goes along; and fain, when he has
reached its last page, to turn back to the beginning, and gather up more
of the riches which he has left upon the road.

To Sir Thomas Maclear and Mr. Mann he writes during his detention
(September, 1870) on a leaf of his cheque-book, his paper being done. He
gives his theory of the rivers, enlarges on the fertility of the
country, bewails his difficulty in getting men, as the Manyuema never go
beyond their own country, and the traders, who have only begun to come
there, are too busy collecting ivory to be able to spare men. "The tusks
were left in the terrible forests, where the animals were killed; the
people, if treated civilly, readily go and bring the precious teeth,
some half rotten, or gnawed by the teeth of a rodent called dezi. I
think that mad naturalists name it Aulocaudatus Swindermanus, or some
equally wise agglutination of syllables.... My chronometers are all
dead; I hope my old watch was