At length, having arranged with the men, he sets out on 16th February over a most beautiful country, but woefully difficult to pass through. Perhaps it was hardly a less bitter disappointment to be told, on the 25th, that the Lualaba flowed west-southwest, so that after all it might be the Congo.
On the 29th March Livingstone arrived at Nyangwe, on the banks of the Lualaba. This was the farthest point westward that he reached in his last Expedition.
The slave-trade here he finds to be as horrible as in any other part of Africa. He is heart-sore for human blood He is threatened, bullied, and almost attacked. In some places, however, the rumor spreads that he makes no slaves, and he is called "the good one." His men are a ceaseless trouble, and for ever mutinying, or otherwise harassing him. And yet he perseveres in his old kind way, hoping by kindness to gain influence with them. Mohamad's people, he finds, have passed him on the west, and thus he loses a number of serviceable articles he was to get from them, and all the notes made for him of the rivers they had passed. The difficulties and discouragements are so great that he wonders whether, after all, God is smiling on his work.
His own men circulate such calumnious reports against him that he is unable to get canoes for the navigation of the Lualaba. This leads to weeks and months of weary waiting, and yet all in vain; but afterward he finds some consolation on discovering that the navigation was perilous, that a canoe had been lost from the inexperience of her crew in the rapids, so that had he been there, he should very likely have perished, as his canoe would probably have been foremost.
A change of plan was necessary. On 5th July he offered to Dugumbé £400, with all the goods he had at Ujiji besides, for men to replace the Banian slaves, and for the other means of going up the Lomamé to Katanga, then returning and going up Tanganyika to Ujiji. Dugumbé took a little time to consult his friends before replying to the offer.
Meanwhile an event occurred of unprecedented horror, that showed Livingstone that he could not go to Lomamé in the company of Dugumbé. Between Dugumbé's people and another chief a frightful system of pillage, murder, and burning of villages was going on with horrible activity. One bright summer morning, 15th July, when fifteen hundred people, chiefly women, were engaged peacefully in marketing in a village on the banks of the Lualaba, and while Dr. Livingstone was sauntering about, a murderous fire was opened on the people, and a massacre ensued of such measureless atrocity that he could describe it only by saying that it gave him the impression of being in hell. The event was so superlatively horrible, and had such an overwhelming influence on Livingstone, that we copy at full length the description of it given in the _Last Journals:_
"Before I had got thirty yards out, the discharge of two guns in the middle of the crowd told me that slaughter had begun; crowds dashed off from the place, and threw down their wares in confusion, and ran. At the same time that the three opened fire on the mass of people near the upper end of the market-place, volleys were discharged from a party down near the creek on the panic-stricken women, who dashed at the canoes. These, some fifty or more, were jammed in the creek, and the men forgot their paddles in the terror that seized all. The canoes were not to be got out, for the creek was too small for so many; men and women, wounded by the balls, poured into them, and leaped and scrambled into the water, shrieking A long line of heads in the river showed that great numbers struck out for an island a full mile off; in going toward it they had to put the left shoulder to a current of about two miles an hour; if they had struck away diagonally to the opposite bank, the current would have aided them, and, though nearly three miles off, some would have gained land; as it was, the heads above water showed the long line of those that would inevitably perish.