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Updated: June 2, 2025
Seven or eight of our people had taken refuge behind the canoe, and had their loaded guns half pointing at the passionate mob, which was momentarily increasing in numbers, but I could not see the Doctor anywhere. "Where is the Doctor?" I asked. "He has gone over that hill, sir, with his compass," said Selim. "Anybody with him?" "Susi and Chumah."
No difficulties were great enough to crush this man. With Susi and Chuma and a party of newly enlisted porters, he set out westwards across the lake, his aim being to visit the Manyuema country, through the outskirts of which flows the Lualaba.
The next day I halted the Expedition at Western Tura, on the Unyamwezi frontier, and on the 20th arrived at Eastern Tura; when, soon after, we heard a loud report of a gun, and Susi and Hamoydah, the Doctor's servants, with Uredi, and another of my men, appeared with a letter for "Sir Thomas MacLear, Observatory, Cape of Good Hope," and one for myself, which read as follows: Kwihara, March 15, 1872.
Milch goats were not to be had, but the chief of the place sent a present of food. Four days later the journey was resumed. The chief provided canoes for crossing the Molilamo, a stream which flows into the lake. The invalid was transferred from the litter to a canoe, and ferried over the swollen stream. On the farther bank Susi went on in advance to the village of Chitambo to get a hut ready.
The pomegranates, aflower above the ripening corn, had finer blossoms than any I had seen before, the fig-trees were Biblical in their glossy splendour. Mules were footsore, the Susi men were tired, the weather was perfect, time was our own for a day or two, and I was aching to take my gun down the long glades that seemed to stretch to the horizon.
Susi waked Chuma and some of the other men, and they went to Livingstone's hut. Their master was kneeling beside the bed, leaning forward with his head buried in his hands. They had often seen him at prayer, and now drew back in reverential silence. But they felt ill at ease, for he did not move; and on going nearer they could not hear him breathe.
Again and again his party would have been destroyed if it had not been for his own unbounded tact and courage, and after his death at Chitambo's village Susi and Chuma journeyed for nine months and over eight hundred miles to take his body to the coast. "We work for a glorious future," said he, "which we are not destined to see the golden age which has not been, but will yet be.
It was only the natural cowardice of ignorant thieves that prevented the savages from taking the boat and its entire contents, together with Bombay and Susi as slaves. I can well imagine the joyful surprise which must have been called forth at the sight and exquisite taste of the Doctor's sugar, and the wonder with which they must have regarded the strange ammunition of the Wasungu.
Then he came back and explained to me that their dietary laws did not allow the Susi to eat anything that had not been killed by bleeding in the orthodox fashion. Had they been with me, to turn wounded birds to the East and cut their throats in the name of Allah, all would have been well, but birds shot dead were an abomination to the righteous Susi.
They knew that the natives had a horror of the dead, believing that spirits in the dark land of the departed thought of nothing but revenge and mischief. Therefore they perform ceremonies to propitiate departed spirits and dissuade them from plaguing the living with war, famine, or sickness. Susi and Chuma, who had been with their master for seven years, felt their responsibility.
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