The African sketch-book . , ever-tearful countless supplications which she offered upbefore she died—those days and nights of solitude andpain—were they all wasted on the air ? O doleful and melancholy day, when I parted frommy mother, never again to see her upon earth ! Odolorous dawn ! heart-breaking hour ! She gave me myshroud, without which no Moslem travels ! I have itbefore me now ; and soon it will wrap these aged andemaciated limbs. Again and again we said farewell. We partedand returned once more, to fall into each othersarms. All day I wandered in the jungle; at evening
The African sketch-book . , ever-tearful countless supplications which she offered upbefore she died—those days and nights of solitude andpain—were they all wasted on the air ? O doleful and melancholy day, when I parted frommy mother, never again to see her upon earth ! Odolorous dawn ! heart-breaking hour ! She gave me myshroud, without which no Moslem travels ! I have itbefore me now ; and soon it will wrap these aged andemaciated limbs. Again and again we said farewell. We partedand returned once more, to fall into each othersarms. All day I wandered in the jungle; at evening I 4o6 . THE STORY 0I< SO LIMA [Book III crept near the cottage, and climbed up a tree. I sawher come out. The veil covered her face ; never morewould it be raised again. She stooped upon theground, and gathered some grass I had trodden withmy feet. Then I cried with anguish, and placing mybundle on my head, journeyed by moonlight on theroad towards the East. r *.s^ 51 A II O f C TME PIOXEKHS O F DISCOVERY in AFRICA. siurAi I. i;k»(;y 01 afuh a « ^ fl v^ \-y 1 mki ,., E£?p \ V 407 THE AFRICAN PIONEERS In this chapter I shall describe how a few heroic men,animated by a spirit of the purest chivalry, laid openCentral Africa, that extraordinary land which hasbeen explored without intermission for a hundredyears, and which still can offer something new. A hundred years ago Shaw had examined themonuments of Barbary, and Bruce had drunk to hissweetheart from the sources of the Nile, as he supposed ;but of Negroland itself—the true Africa—little wasknown beyond the coast. The best maps of the daywere based on those of Ptolemy and Edrisi ; the mostreliable authority was Leo Africanus, a Morisco ofGranada. When Herodotus was at Memphis in Egypt taking-notes on his wooden tablets, he heard of a great riverbeyond the sandy Sahara, flowing from west to east,and conjectured that it was a tributaiy of the a later date this river obtained an appellation of itsown, but
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