“There are many flowers in the forest; marigolds, a white jonquil-looking flower without smell, many orchids, white, yellow, and pink asclepias, with bunches of French-white flowers, clematis—­Methonica gloriosa, gladiolus, and blue and deep purple polygalas, grasses with white starry seed-vessels, and spikelets of brownish red and yellow.  Besides these, there are beautiful blue flowering bulbs, and new flowers of pretty, delicate form and but little scent.  To this list may be added balsams, composite of blood-red color and of purple; other flowers of liver color, bright canary yellow, pink orchids on spikes thickly covered all round, and of three inches in length; spiderworts of fine blue or yellow or even pink.  Different colored asclepiadeae; beautiful yellow and red umbelliferous flowering plants; dill and wild parsnips; pretty flowering aloes, yellow and red, in one whorl of blossoms; peas and many other flowering plants which I do not know.”

Observations were taken with unremitting diligence, except when, as was now common, nothing could be seen in the heavens.  As they advanced, the weather became worse.  It rained as if nothing but rain were ever known in the watershed.  The path lay across flooded rivers, which were distinguished by their currents only from the flooded country along their banks.  Dr. Livingstone had to be carried over the rivers on the back of one of his men, in the fashion so graphically depicted on the cover of the Last Journals.  The stretches of sponge that came before and after the rivers, with their long grass and elephant-holes, were scarcely less trying.  The inhabitants were, commonly, most unfriendly to the party; they refused them food, and, whenever they could, deceived them as to the way.  Hunger bore down on the party with its bitter gnawing.  Once a mass of furious ants attacked the Doctor by night, driving him in despair from hut to hut.  Any frame but one of Iron must have succumbed to a single month of such a life, and before a week was out, any body of men, not held together by a power of discipline and a charm of affection unexampled in the history of difficult expeditions, would have been scattered to the four winds.  Livingstone’s own sufferings were beyond all previous example.

About this time he began an undated letter—­his last—­to his old friends Sir Thomas Maclear and Mr. Mann.  It was never finished, and never despatched; but as one of the latest things he ever wrote, it is deeply interesting, as showing how clear, vigorous, and independent his mind was to the very last: 

     “LAKE BANGWEOLO, SOUTH CENTRAL AFRICA.