Hogg.
These two short trips gave me a just measure of the comparative
difficulties in travelling through Eastern and Western Africa,
and to a certain extent accounted for the huge vacuum which
disfigures the latter, a few miles behind the seaboard. The road
to Unyamwezi, for instance, has been trodden for centuries; the
people have become trained porters; they look forward annually to
visiting the coast, and they are accustomed to the sight of
strangers, Arabs and others. If war or blood-feud chance to close
one line, the general interests of the interior open another. But
in this section of Africa there is no way except from village to
village, and a blood-feud may shut it for months. The people have
not the habit of dealing with the foreigner, whom they look upon
as a portent, a walking ghost, an ill-omened apparition.
Porterage is in embryo, no scale of payment exists; and no dread
of cutting off a communication profitable to both importer and
exporter prevents the greedy barbarian plundering the stranger.
Captain Speke and I were fortunate in being the first whites who
seriously attempted the Lake Region; our only obstacles were the
European merchants at Zanzibar; the murder of M.
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