hey had been
instructed by their Banian masters to baffle him in every way, so that
their slave-trading should not be injured by his disclosures. Their two
head-men, Shereef and Awathe, had refused to come farther than Ujiji,
and were reveling in his goods there. Dr. Livingstone never ceased to
lament and deplore that the men who had been sent to him were so utterly
unsuitable. One of them actually formed a plot for his destruction,
which was only frustrated through his being overheard by one whom
Livingstone could trust. Livingstone wrote to his friends that owing to
the inefficiency of the men, he lost two years of time, about a thousand
pounds in money, had some 2000 miles of useless traveling, and was four
several times subjected to the risk of a violent death.

At length, having arranged with the men, he sets out on 16th February
over a most beautiful country, but woefully difficult to pass through.
Perhaps it was hardly a less bitter disappointment to be told, on the
25th, that the Lualaba flowed west-southwest, so that after all it might
be the Congo.

On the 29th March Livingstone arrived at Nyangwe, on the banks of the
Lualaba. This was the farthest point westward that he reached in his
last Expedition.

The slave-trade here he finds to be as horrible as in any other part of
Africa. He is heart-sore for human blood He is threatened, bullied, and
almost attacked. In some places, however, the rumor spreads that he
makes no slaves, and he is called "the good one." His men are a
ceaseless trouble, and for ever mutinying, or otherwise harassing him.
And yet he perseveres in his old kind way, hoping by kindness to gain
influence with them. Mohamad's people, he finds, have passed him on the
west, and thus he loses a number of serviceable articles he was to get
from them, and all the notes made for him of the rivers they had passed.
The difficulties and discouragements are so great that he wonders
whether, after all, God is smiling on his work.

His own men circulate such calumnious reports against him that he is
unable to get canoes for the navigation of the Lualaba. This leads to
weeks and months of weary waiting, and yet all in vain; but afterward he
finds some consolation on discovering that the navigation was perilous,
that a canoe had been lost from the inexperience of her crew in the
rapids, so that had he been there, he should very likely have perished,
as his canoe would probably have been foremost.

A c