“MY DEAR FRIENDS MACLEAR AND MANN,—...  My work at present is mainly retracing my steps to take up the thread of my exploration.  It counts in my lost time, but I try to make the most of it by going round outside this lake and all the sources, so that no one may come afterward and cut me out.  I have a party of good men, selected by H. M. Stanley, who, at the instance of James Gordon Bennett, of the New York Herald, acted the part of a good Samaritan truly, and relieved my sore necessities.  A dutiful son could not have done more than he generously did.  I bless him.  The men, fifty-six in number, have behaved as well as Makololo.  I cannot award them higher praise, though they have not the courage of that brave kind-hearted people.  From Unyanyembe we went due south to avoid an Arab war which had been going on for eighteen months.  It is like one of our Caffre wars, with this difference—­no one is enriched thereby, for all trade is stopped, and the Home Government pays nothing.  We then went westward to Tanganyika, and along its eastern excessively mountainous bank to the end.  The heat was really broiling among the rocks.  No rain had fallen, and the grass being generally burned off, the heat rose off the black ashes as if out of an oven, yet the flowers persisted in coming out of the burning soil, and generally without leaves, as if it had been a custom that they must observe by a law of the Medes and Persians.  This part detained us long; the men’s limbs were affected with a sort of subcutaneous inflammation,—­black rose or erysipelas,—­and when I proposed mildly and medically to relieve the tension it was too horrible to be thought of, but they willingly carried the helpless.  Then we mounted up at once into the high, cold region Urungu, south of Tanganyika, and into the middle of the rainy season, with well-grown grass and everything oppressively green; rain so often that no observations could be made, except at wide intervals.  I could form no opinion as to our longitude, and but little of our latitudes.  Three of the Baurungu chiefs, one a great friend of mine, Nasonso, had died, and the population all turned topsy-turvy, so I could make no use of previous observations.  They elect sisters’ or brothers’ sons to the chieftainship, instead of the heir-apparent.  Food was not to be had for either love or money.

“I was at the mercy of guides who did not know their own country, and when I insisted on following the compass, they threatened, ‘no food for five or ten days in that line.’  They brought us down to the back or north side of Bangweolo, while I wanted to cross the Chambeze and go round its southern side.  So back again southeastward we had to bend.  The Portuguese crossed this Chambeze a long time ago, and are therefore the first European discoverers.  We were not black men with Portuguese names like those for whom the feat of crossing the continent was eagerly claimed by Lisbon statesmen.  Dr. Lacerda