ilous journey. Though
warned that the monsoon would shortly break, he would not be deterred.
And after sailing two thousand five hundred miles in the little boat
built only for river and lake, "a forest of masts one day loomed through
the haze in Bombay harbour," and he was safe. After a brief stay here,
Livingstone left his little launch and made his way to England on a
mail-packet.

But no one realised at this time the importance of his new discoveries.
No one foresaw the value of "Nyassaland" now under British
protectorate. Livingstone had brought to light a lake fifteen hundred
and seventy feet above the sea, three hundred and fifty miles long
and forty broad, up and down which British steamers make their way
to-day, while the long range of mountains lining the eastern bank,
known as the Livingstone range, testify to the fact that he had done
much, even if he might have done more.

CHAPTER LXV

EXPEDITION TO VICTORIA NYANZA

While Livingstone was discovering Lake Nyassa, Speke was busy
preparing for a new expedition to find out more about the great sheet
of water he had named Victoria Nyanza and to solve the vexed question:
Was this the source of the Nile?

In April 1860, accompanied by Captain Grant, an old friend and brother
sportsman, he left England, and by way of the Cape reached Zanzibar
some five months later. The two explorers started for their great
inland journey early in October, with some hundred followers, bound
for the great lake. But it was January 1861 before they had covered
the five hundred miles between the coast and Kaze, the old
halting-station of Burton and Speke. Through the agricultural plains
known as Uzarana, the country of Rana, where many negro porters
deserted, because they believed the white men were cannibals and
intended to eat them when safe away from the haunts of men; through
Usagara, the country of Gara, where Captain Grant was seized with
fever; through Ugogo's great wilderness, where buffalo and rhinoceros
abounded, where the country was flooded with tropical rains, on to
the land of the Moon, three thousand feet above sea-level, till the
slowly moving caravan reached Kaze. Here terrible accounts of famine
and war reached them, and, instead of following Speke's route of 1858,
they turned north-west and entered the Uzinza country, governed by
two chieftains of Abyssinian descent. Here Speke was taken desperately
ill. His cough gave him no rest day or night; his leg