122 WESTWARD TO LAKE VICTORIA NYANZA 



flows out of the Great Lake, it is at once on the easiest line of water 

 communication with Lake Albert and the Soudan, and also a place 

 where great waterpower is available. In years to come the shores 

 of this splendid bay may be crowned with long rows of comfortable 

 tropical villas and imposing offices, and the gorge of the Nile crowded 

 with factories and warehouses. There is power enough to gin all 

 the cotton and saw all the wood in Uganda, and it is here that one 

 of the principal emporia of tropical produce will certainly be created. 

 In these circumstances it is a pity to handicap the town with an out- 

 landish name. It would be much better to call it Ripon Falls, after 

 the beautiful cascades which lie beneath it, and from whose force its 

 future prosperity will be derived. 



"The Ripon Falls are, for their own sake, well worth a visit. 

 The Nile springs out of the Victoria Nyanza, a vast body of water 

 nearly as wide as the Thames at Westminster Bridge, and this impos- 

 ing river rushes down a stairway of rock from fifteen to twenty feet 

 deep, in smooth, swirling slopes of green water. It w^ould be per- 

 fectly easy to harness the whole river and let the Nile begin its long 

 and beneficent journey to the sea by leaping through a turbine. It 

 is possible that nowhere else in the world could so enormous a mass 

 of water be held up by so little masonry. Two or three short dams 

 from island to island across the falls would enable, at an incon- 

 ceivably small cost, the whole level of the Victoria Nyanza — over 

 an expanse of a hundred and fifty thousand square miles — to be gradu- 

 ally raised six or seven feet; would greatly increase the available 

 water-power; w^ould deepen the water in Kavirondo Bay, so as to 

 admit steamers of much larger draught; and, finally, would enable 

 the lake to be maintained at a uniform level, so that immense areas 

 of swampy foreshore, now submerged, now again exposed, according 

 to the rainfalls, would be converted either into clear water or dry 

 land." 



As we have described the natives of the Rift Valley, a brief 

 account, from the pen of Sir Harry Johnston, of some of those who 

 dwell in the vicinity of the Great Lake will not be w^ithout interest. 

 Those w4io reach this region before civilization has done away with 

 the customs of its native inhabitants "will see before them coal-black 



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