Dr. Beke on the Sources of the Nile. 113 



less than men of middle stature, came up, and having seized 

 them carried them away ; and that the Nasamonians did not 

 at all understand their language, nor those who carried them 

 off' the language of the Nasamonians. However, they con- 

 ducted them through vast morasses, and when they had passed 

 these, they came to a city, in which all the inhabitants were of 

 tl.e same size as their conductors, and black in colour: and 

 by the city flowed a great river, running from the 'west to the 

 east, and that crocodiles were seen in it. Thus far I have 

 set forth the account of Etearchus the Ammonian ; to which 

 may be added, as the Cyrenjeans assured me, that he said 

 the Nasamonians all returned safe to their own country, and 

 that the men whom they came to were all necromancers. 

 Etearchus also conjectured that this river, which flows by 

 their city, is the Nile ; and reason so evinces : for the Nile 

 flows from Libya, and intersects it in the middle, and (as I 

 conjecture, inferring things unknown from things known) it 



sets out from a point corresponding with the Ister So I 



think that the Nile, traversing the whole of Libya, may be 

 properly compared with the Ister. Such, then, is the ac- 

 count that I am able to give respecting the Nile*." 



The objection usually made to the supposition that this 

 river of Herodotus is the upper course of the Nile, is, that 

 the Nasamonians travelled, not southwards but westwards, 

 and that consequently they could not have reached any river 

 but the Niger. But, if the historian's expressions are to 

 be taken as strictly meaning that the road lay throughout in a 

 westerly direction, it is manifest that it would be just as impos- 

 sible for the travellers to have arrived at the Niger as to have 

 reached a western arm of the river of Egypt. In either case, 

 then, we are bound to suppose that they first proceeded south- 

 awards — to what distance we cannot say — and then, by con- 

 tinuing during the last part of their journey in a westerly di- 

 rection (which is in no wise to be understood as meaning due 

 west), they may without difficulty have come to the Nile, that 

 is to say, to the upper course of this great western arm, pos- 

 sibly at no very great distance to the east or north-east of 

 Lake Tchad. 



The mention of this lake induces me to suggest the proba- 

 bility that Nyassi and Tchad, the one at the extremity of the 

 southernmost and the other at the extremity of the western- 

 most arm of the Nile, are the originals of the two lakes 

 which Ptolemy describes as receiving the snows of the Moun- 

 tains of the Moon. 



It has merely to be added, that, according to a sketch-map 

 * Lib. ii. § 31-34; Gary's translation. 



VhiU Mag. S. 3. Vol. 35. No. 234^. Aug. 1849. I 



