On this same expedition, which lasted five months, Burnham
endured one of the severest hardships of his life. Alone with ten
Kaffir boys, he started on a week's journey across the dried-up
basin of what once had been a great lake. Water was carried in
goat-skins on the heads of the bearers. The boys, finding the bags
an unwieldy burden, and believing, with the happy optimism of
their race, that Burnham's warnings were needless, and that at a
stream they soon could refill the bags, emptied the water on the
ground.
The tortures that followed this wanton waste were terrible. Five of
the boys died, and after several days, when Burnham found water
in abundance, the tongues of the others were so swollen that their
jaws could not meet.
On this trip Burnham passed through a region ravaged by the
"sleeping sickness," where his nostrils were never free from the
stench of dead bodies, where in some of the villages, as he
expressed it, "the hyenas were mangy with overeating, and the
buzzards so gorged they could not move out of our way." From this
expedition he brought back many ornaments of gold manufactured
before the Christian era, and made several valuable maps of
hitherto uncharted regions. It was in recognition of the information
gathered by him on this trip that he was elected a Fellow of the
Royal Geographical Society.
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