Landing in India was a strange experience, as he tells Sir Thomas Maclear. "To walk among the teeming thousands of all classes of population, and see so many things that reading and pictures had made familiar to the mind, was very interesting. The herds of the buffaloes, kept I believe for their milk, invariably made the question glance across the mind, 'Where's your rifle?' Nor could I look at the elephants either without something of the same feeling. Hundreds of bales of cotton were lying on the wharves.".
"20_th June_, 1864--Went with Captain Leith to Poona to visit the Free Church Mission Schools there, under the Rev. Mr. Mitchell, Gardner, etc. A very fine school of 500 boys and young men answered questions very well.... All collected together, and a few ladies and gentlemen for whom I answered questions about Africa. We then went to a girls' school; the girls sang very nicely, then acted a little play. There were different castes in all the schools, and quite mixed. After this we went to College, where young men are preparing for degrees of the University under Dr. Haug and Mr. Wordsworth; then to the Roman Catholic Orphanage, where 200 girls are assembled, clothed, and fed under a French Lady Superior--dormitory clean and well aired, but many had scrofulous-looking sore eyes; then home to see some friends whom Lady Frere had invited, to save me the trouble of calling on them. Saw Mr. Cowan's daughter."
"21_st June_, 1864.--... Had a conversation with the Governor after breakfast about the slaving going on toward the Persian Gulf. His idea is that they are now only beginning to put a stop to slavery--they did not know of it previously.... The merchants of Bombay have got the whole of the trade of East Africa thrown on their hands, and would, it is thought, engage in an effort to establish commerce on the coast. The present Sultan is, for an Arab, likely to do a good deal. He asked if I would undertake to be consul at a settlement, but I think I have not experience enough for a position of that kind among Europeans."
On returning to Bombay, he saw the missionary institutions of the Scotch Established and Free Churches, and arranged with Dr. Wilson of the latter mission to take his two boys, Chuma and Wikatani. He arranged also that the "Lady Nyassa," which he had not yet sold, should be taken care of, and borrowing £133, 10s. for the passage-money of himself and John Reid, one of his men, embarked for old England.
At Aden considerable rain had fallen lately; he observed that there was much more vegetation than when he was there before, and it occurred to him that at the time of the Exodus the same effects probably followed the storms of rain, lightning, and hail in Egypt. Egypt was very far from green, so that Dr. Stanley must have visited it at another part of the year. At Alexandria, when he went on board the "Ripon," he found the Maharaja Dhuleep Singh and his young Princess--the girl he had fancied and married from an English Egyptian school. Paris is reached on the 21st July; a day is spent in resting; and on the evening of the 23d he reaches Charing Cross, and is regaled with what, after nearly eight years' absence, must have been true music--the roar of the mighty Babylon.
The desponding views of his work which we find in such entries in his Journal as that of 20th May must not be held to express his deliberate mind. It must not be thought that he had thrown aside the motto which had helped him as much as it had helped his royal countryman, Robert Bruce--"Try again." He had still some arrows in his quiver. And his short visit to Bombay was a source of considerable encouragement. The merchants there, who had the East African trade in their hands, encouraged him to hope that a settlement for honest traffic might be established to the north of the region over which the Portuguese claimed authority. As Livingstone moved homeward he was revolving two projects. The first was to expose the atrocious slave-trading of the Portuguese, which had not only made all his labor fruitless, but had used his very discoveries as channels for spreading fresh misery over Africa. The thought warmed his blood, and he felt like a Highlander with his hand on his claymore. The second project was to find means for a new settlement at the head of the Rovuma, or somewhere else beyond the Portuguese lines, which he would return in the end of the year to establish. Writing a short book might help to accomplish both these projects. As yet, the idea of finding the sources of the Nile was not in his mind. It was at the earnest request of others that he undertook the work that cost him so many years of suffering, and at last his life.