“‘I would like very much to go home and see my children once again, but I cannot bring my heart to abandon the task I have undertaken when it is so nearly completed. It only requires six or seven months more to trace the true source that I have discovered with Petherick’s branch of the White Nile, or with the Albert Nyanza of Sir Samuel Baker. Why should I go before my task is ended, to have to come back again to do what I can very well do now?’ ‘And why,’ I asked, ‘did you come so far back without finishing the short task which you say you have yet to do?’ ‘Simply because I was forced; my men would not budge a step forward. They mutinied and formed a secret resolution that if I still insisted on going on to raise a disturbance in the country, and after they had effected it to abandon me, in which case I should be killed. It was dangerous to go any farther. I had explored six hundred miles of the watershed, had traced all the principal streams which discharged their waters into the central line of drainage, and when about starting to explore the last one hundred miles the hearts of my people failed, and they set about frustrating me in every possible way. Now, having returned seven hundred miles to get a new supply of stores and another escort, I find myself destitute of even the means to live but for a few weeks, and sick in mind and body.’
“Again, about a week after I had arrived in Ujiji, I asked Livingstone if he had examined the northern head of the Tanganyika. He answered immediately he had not, and then asked if people expected he had.
“‘I did try before setting out for Manyema,’ he said, ‘to engage canoes and proceed northward, but I soon saw that the people were all confederating to fleece me as they had Burton, and had I gone under such circumstances I should not have been able to proceed to Manyema to explore the central line of drainage, and of course the most important line--far more important than the line of the Tanganyika; for whatever connection there may be between the Tanganyika and the Albert the true sources of the Nile are those emptying into the central line of drainage. In my own mind I have not the least doubt that the Rusizi River flows from this lake into the Albert. For three months steadily I observed a current setting northward. I verified it by means of water plants. When Speke gives the altitude of the Tanganyika at only 1,880 feet above the sea I imagine he must have fallen into the error by frequently writing the Anno Domini, and thus made a slip of the pen; for the altitude is over two thousand eight hundred feet by boiling point, though I make it a little over three thousand feet by barometers. Thus you see that there are no very great natural difficulties on the score of altitude, and nothing to prevent the reasonable supposition that there may be a water connection by means of the Rusizi or some other river between the two lakes. Besides, the Arabs here are divided in their statements. Some swear that the river goes out of the Tanganyika, others that it flows into the Tanganyika.’