Very curious are the effects of African fever on certain minds.  Cheerfulness vanishes, and the whole mental horizon is overcast with black clouds of gloom and sadness.  The liveliest joke cannot provoke even the semblance of a smile.  The countenance is grave, the eyes suffused, and the few utterances are made in the piping voice of a wailing infant.  An irritable temper is often the first symptom of approaching fever.  At such times a man feels very much like a fool, if he does not act like one.  Nothing is right, nothing pleases the fever-stricken victim.  He is peevish, prone to find fault and to contradict, and think himself insulted, and is exactly what an Irish naval surgeon before a court-martial defined a drunken man to be:  “a man unfit for society.”

Finding that it was impossible to take our steamer of only ten-horse power through Kebrabasa, and convinced that, in order to force a passage when the river was in flood, much greater power was required, due information was forwarded to Her Majesty’s Government, and application made for a more suitable vessel.  Our attention was in the mean time turned to the exploration of the river Shire, a northern tributary of the Zambesi, which joins it about a hundred miles from the sea.  We could learn nothing satisfactory from the Portuguese regarding this affluent; no one, they said, had ever been up it, nor could they tell whence it came.  Years ago a Portuguese expedition is said, however, to have attempted the ascent, but to have abandoned it on account of the impenetrable duckweed (Pistia stratiotes.) We could not learn from any record that the Shire had ever been ascended by Europeans.  As far, therefore, as we were concerned, the exploration was absolutely new.  All the Portuguese believed the Manganja to be brave but bloodthirsty savages; and on our return we found that soon after our departure a report was widely spread that our temerity had been followed by fatal results, Dr. Livingstone having been shot, and Dr. Kirk mortally wounded by poisoned arrows.

Our first trip to the Shire was in January, 1859.  A considerable quantity of weed floated down the river for the first twenty-five miles, but not sufficient to interrupt navigation with canoes or with any other craft.  Nearly the whole of this aquatic plant proceeds from a marsh on the west, and comes into the river a little beyond a lofty hill called Mount Morambala.  Above that there is hardly any.  As we approached the villages, the natives collected in large numbers, armed with bows and poisoned arrows; and some, dodging behind trees, were observed taking aim as if on the point of shooting.  All the women had been sent out of the way, and the men were evidently prepared to resist aggression.  At the village of a chief named Tingane, at least five hundred natives collected and ordered us to stop.  Dr. Livingstone went ashore; and on his explaining that we were English and had come neither to take slaves