"Shot after shot continued to be fired on the helpless and
perishing. Some of the long line of heads disappeared
quietly; whilst other poor creatures threw their arms high,
as if appealing to the great Father above, and sank. One
canoe took in as many as it could hold, and all paddled with
hands and arms; three canoes, got out in haste, picked up
sinking friends, till all went down together, and
disappeared. One man in a long canoe, which could have held
forty or fifty, had clearly lost his head; he had been out in
the stream before the massacre began, and now paddled up the
river nowhere, and never looked to the drowning. By and by
all the heads disappeared; some had turned down stream toward
the bank, and escaped. Dugumbe put people into one of the
deserted vessls to save those in the water, and saved
twenty-one; but one woman refused to be taken on board, from
thinking that she was to be made a slave of; she preferred
the chance of life by swimming to the lot of a slave. The
Bagenya women are expert in the water, as they are accustomed
to dive for oysters, and those who went down stream may have
escaped, but the Arabs themselves estimated the loss of life
at between 330 and 400 souls. The shooting-party near the
canoes were so reckless, they killed two of their own people;
and a Banyamwezi follower, who got into a deserted canoe to
plunder, fell into the water, went down, then came up again,
and down to rise no more.

"After the terrible affair in the water, the party of
Tagamoio, who was the chief perpetrator, continued to fire on
the people there, and fire their villages. As I write I hear
the loud wails on the left bank over those who are there
slain, ignorant of their many friends now in the depths of
Lualaba. Oh, let Thy kingdom come! No one will ever know the
exact loss on this bright sultry summer morning; it gave me
the impression of being in Hell. All the slaves in the camp
rushed at the fugitives on land, and plundered them; women
were for hours collecting and carrying loads of what had been
thrown down in terror."

The remembrance of this awful scene was never effaced from Livingstone's
heart. The accounts of it published in the newspapers at home sent a
thrill of horror through the country. It was recorded at great length in