On leaving Lake Bangweolo, detention occurred again as it had occurred before.  The country was very disturbed and very miserable, and Dr. Livingstone was in great straits and want.  Yet with a grim humor he tells how, when lying in an open shed, with all his men around him, he dreamed of having apartments at Mivart’s Hotel.  It was after much delay that he found himself at last, under the escort of a slave-party, on the way to Ujiji.  Mr. Waller has graphically described the situation.  “At last he makes a start on the 11th of December, 1868, with the Arabs, who are bound eastward for Ujiji.  It is a motley group, composed of Mohamad and his friends, a gang of Unyamwezi hangers-on, and strings of wretched slaves yoked together in their heavy slave-sticks.  Some carry ivory, others copper, or food for the march, while hope and fear, misery and villainy, may be read off on the various faces that pass in line out of this country, like a serpent dragging its accursed folds away from the victim it has paralyzed with its fangs.”

New Year’s Day, 1869, found Livingstone laboring under a worse attack of illness than any he had ever had before.  For ten weeks to come his situation was as painful as can be conceived.  A continual cough, night and day, the most distressing weakness, inability to walk, yet the necessity of moving on, or rather of being moved on, in a kind of litter arranged by Mohamad Bogharib,—­where, with his face poorly protected from the sun, he was jolted up and down and sideways, without medicine or food for an invalid,—­made the situation sufficiently trying.  His prayer was that he might hold out to Ujiji, where he expected to find medicines and stores, with the rest and shelter so necessary in his circumstances.  So ill was he, that he lost count of the days of the week and the month.  “I saw myself lying dead in the way to Ujiji, and all the letters I expected there—­useless.  When I think of my children, the lines ring through my head perpetually: 

     “’I shall look into your faces,
       And listen to what you say;
     And be often very near you
       When you think I’m far away.’”

On the 26th February, 1869, he embarked in a canoe on Tanganyika, and on the 14th March he reached the longed-for Ujiji, on the eastern shore of the lake.  To complete his trial, he found that the goods he expected had been made away with in every direction.  A few fragments were about all he could find.  Medicines, wine, and cheese had been left at Unyanyembe, thirteen days distant.  A war was raging on the way, so that they could not be sent for till the communications were restored.