At any rate, here I was in the wilderness with nothing but my rifle and revolver and a knife and perhaps twenty cartridges in the belt around my waist, and nothing to eat, and so weak that I couldn't stand. I said to myself at once: "This is the end; the sooner I put a bullet through my head the better. No use writing anything; it would never be seen. If any white people come to the place and find my dead body, my rifle will tell them the tale. Had I anything to say of any value to anybody?" I decided that I had not. I took up the rifle to end it all, when suddenly my eye caught sight of the five or six tins of sardines which I had tossed the night before into the corner of the tent.
Six boxes of sardines and one of soup meant life for a good while, and after all I was quite close to the Zambesi, to the river that ran to the sea and to civilization, say, six hundred miles away. If I had been well, twenty miles a day would have gotten me to the sea in a month, but even ill, surely I might do it in two months! I tied my most necessary things into a bundle, took several boxes of matches and a little tin kettle, strapped the whole on my back, and two mornings after I came again to the Zambesi. I determined to
stick to the river and look for a canoe: some dug-out or canoe might be abandoned and I might have the luck to find it.
Next morning I began to make my way to the sea: at first the fever was very high, but I kept on taking daily doses of quinine and nightly doses of arsenic.
But alas! I had only the one package, picked from the box which had been by my bedside: I had to be content with small doses.
Perhaps the hard exercise or the starvation did me good: in two or three days I reckoned I had made about fifteen miles down the river, and I was certainly stronger, so I took my first meal of three sardines. All the afternoon I was ill, and the next day could scarcely crawl. Wherever I saw the semblance of a path through the reeds to the river I looked out for a canoe, but for many days I saw nothing, except some hippos in the river and deer in the distance. The less I ate, however, the less fever I had. But the weakness persisted, my legs seemed to have no bones in them, and half an hour's walk tired me out. What I suffered, I can never tell. I couldn't have made much more than sixty or seventy miles in the month; and it was a month before I found a canoe, three days after I had wolfed my last sardine.
But the dug-out was salvation, and as I lay in it, I realized that I should now be able to make fifty or sixty miles a day; one lucky shot would give me food, and the current would bring me to civilization in ten days or a fortnight: the mere hope gave me new life. In an hour I had made a couple of rude paddles and had waded through the reeds and pushed into the full stream. No more painful walking or crawling-thank God!
Luck held with me. That day, or the next, I saw a small hippo standing on the bank. I took most careful aim and fired and he fell to the shot; in a few dozen strokes I was into the bank and beside him: he was dead-the bullet had gone clean through his head just behind the eye. Once only in my life did I feel more of a murderer, but necessity is the first law, so I opened his mouth and cut out his tongue, and went down the river half a mile with it before I lit a little fire and boiled it in my kettle, boiled and boiled and boiled it till it was more than cooked; and I had my first real meal in five or six weeks. It was the turning point-my fever got less from day to day and I slept interminably; one thing only bothered me: my beard grew inordinately and there were some grey hairs in it-there were not many-I could still count them, and I was over forty-but I resented their appearance and swore to myself that I wouldn't mount the white feather until I was over sixty, if I could ever get out of Africa.
I have nothing more to recount of any interest till I got to the first Portuguese settlement, and there I had an amusing experience. I secured my canoe on the bank but I couldn't make up my mind to leave the kettle and a few odds and ends, so I carried them with me. As soon as I got into the street of the little village, every one I came across had a good look at me and then bolted incontinently: children, women, men-everybody. As I passed a barbershop, I thought I would make myself decent before trying to get anything in a restaurant. The barber was shaving a man, but as soon as he saw me he dropped his razor and shot into the back room; the man, half-shaved, got up, indignant, but after one look at me, he slipped out into the street and disappeared; so I went over and looked at myself in the glass. Never was there such an appearance: nose and eyes and a long ill-grown beard on the face of a corpse-I had never seen any human face so thin, and my dirty shirt and clothes, and the kettle in one hand, and all my belongings in the other; I don't wonder that the people fled. I knocked at the inner room and the barber ventured out as soon as he saw the gold sovereign — I had a good deal of money about me. In a little while he cut off my beard and shaved me, but even then my face frightened me: it was emaciated, a skeleton-face. I asked the barber for a restaurant and he pointed on down the street to one, and in five minutes I was seated at a table with a beefsteak in front of me. I ate very little because I was afraid of indigestion, and with good reason: in an hour I had thrown up most of what I had eaten; and I was back in the restaurant to try something else, till I saw it was useless. My stomach had been ruined by the berries and leaves I had eaten: I could digest scarcely anything; meanwhile, half the town came to the restaurant to see me.
In spite of the heat, I bought an overcoat which covered my rags, and got a room for the night in a decent hotel and had a long hot bath: it seemed impossible to get clean. Before going to bed, I saw the doctor, who was a Portuguese and knew some English. He told me to eat only soup and brought me little arsenic pills that did me a great deal of good. What I weighed then I have no idea, but a month later on the German steamer taking me up the coast, I weighed less than eighty pounds, although my normal weight was then about one hundred and sixty.
I must explain why I didn't get stouter. Only on the first day was I able to eat and digest a little food. On the second day everything disagreed with me; I had acute spasm after spasm of indigestion. I tried everything, but my stomach was hopelessly enfeebled, partly by the berries and partly by the other indigestible things I had eaten. If any reader wants to know the best thing I had in weeks-it was a small snake, the head of which I cut off and then boiled the body; and the worst thing I ever attempted to eat was a caterpillar; there was a certain red berry which really poisoned me, but the taste of the caterpillar will live with me as long as I live: it was disgusting.
The doctor on the German liner tried everything to help my digestion, but nothing did me any good. In Germany, Schweninger made me believe that a fast of ten or fourteen days would bring my stomach into good order. I tried the fast and prolonged it till I found my legs failing on going down some stairs; then I began to drink milk and afterwards vegetable soup, and so brought myself gradually to a normal diet. But as soon as I began to eat solids again, I had unbearable indigestion.
Schweninger taught me nothing except the science of getting thin, which he had proved on Bismarck: his discovery was that drinking with one's meals alone makes fat. If you drink nothing for half an hour before your meals and for two hours after, you will lose weight at the rate of a couple of pounds a day, after the first day or two. By following this regimen, Bismarck, when already old, lost some sixty pounds and came to better health. Later I, too, tried this cure and found it efficacious. Since then, whenever I want to bring my weight down to normal, I simply follow Schweninger's regimen for a few days.