The heavy Cape wagon with its ten poor oxen dragged heavily onward.  Livingstone had so loaded himself with parcels for stations up-country, and his wagon and team were so inferior, that he did not reach Kuruman until September.  Here he was detained by the breaking of a wheel.

The journey to Linyanti by the new route was very trying.  Part of the country was flooded, and they were wading all day, and forcing their way through reeds with sharp edges “with hands all raw and bloody.”  “On emerging from the swamps,” says Livingstone, “when walking before the wagon in the morning twilight, I observed a lioness about fifty yards from me in the squatting way they walk when going to spring.  She was followed by a very large lion, but seeing the wagon she turned back.”

It required all his tact to prevent guides and servants from deserting.  Everyone but himself was attacked by fever.  “I would like,” says his journal, “to devote a portion of my life to the discovery of a remedy for that terrible disease, the African fever.  I would go into the parts where it prevails most and try to discover if the natives have a remedy for it.  I must make many inquiries of the river people in this quarter.”  Again in another key:  “Am I on my way to die in Sebituane’s country?  Have I seen the last of my wife and children, leaving this fair world and knowing so little of it?”

February 4, 1853:  “I am spared in health while all the company have been attacked by fever.  If God has accepted my service, my life is charmed till my work is done.  When that is finished, some simple thing will give me my quietus.  Death is a glorious event to one going to Jesus.”

Their progress was tedious beyond all precedent.  “We dug out several wells, and each time had to wait a day or two till enough water flowed in for our cattle to quench their thirst.”

At last, however, at the end of May, he reached the Chobe River and was again among his favorite Makololo.  “He has dropped from the clouds,” the first of them said.  They took the wagon to pieces and carried it across on canoes lashed together, while they themselves swam and dived among the oxen “more like alligators than men.”  Sekeletu, son of Sebituane, was now chief, his elder sister Mamochishane having resigned in disgust at the number of husbands she had to maintain as chieftainess.  Poor Mamochishane!  After a short reign of a few months she had risen in the assembly and “addressed her brother with a womanly gush of tears.  ’I have been a chief only because my father wished it.  I would always have preferred to be married and have a family like other women.  You, Sekeletu, must be chief, and build up our father’s house.’”