The Iiinvenzori IJanofe 



&^ 



at first sight lie uxpluiiicd 1)y adiuittiny tliat those iiijtiiiii.s alioiit the hyilro- 

 graphic relations might have been gathered hy Ptolemy with the helj) of 

 itineraries made along the valley of the ri\-er itself and generally in the 

 direction from north to south. ('*) Only, as Ptolemy himself says, these 

 particulai-s were extant, at least in ])art, in tlie work of Mariniis of Tyre, 

 who in his turn had derived them fnim one of the then recent reports of the 

 first Greek navigators of Kgypt, who freiiuented the markets of East Africa 

 from Cape Aromata to Gape Khaptum ('■'') : " After this he (Marinus) says that 

 in the vo\'age between the Aromata and Khaj)tuni promontories a certain 

 Diogenes . . . was in the neighliourhood of the Aromata, driven ly the 

 northern winds, and having on his right hand the Troglodytica arrived in 

 five days at the lakes where the Nile rises, these lakes being somewhat more 

 to the north than Khapta." ("') 



In this the geographer of Tyre is contradicted Ity Ptolemy, who a little 

 further on says : " The lakes whence rises the Nile are not near the sea, but far 

 more inland on the Continent." This is an important correction very jirobaljly 

 suggested to Ptolemy liy the reports of those Greek seafarers, since the places 

 from time to time visited by them on the east coast of Africa were not only 

 important from the commercial standpoint, but also as so many centres 

 whither fresh and numerous particulars could not fail to come to hand about 

 the geographical and natural conditions of the inland region.s. Xo wonder, 

 therefore, if amongst those particulars was also that most important one 

 regarding the existences of two lak-.'s ; and as the eniporiiuu nf Khapta, a 

 place of great consequence and spoken of liy Ptolemy as a metropolis {']'(i-t/, 

 faj-l>u7ro\fi), is placed liy him under the latitude of 7' S. ('"), while, on the 

 other hand, he was naturally iiirliiie<l to believe that the two lakes lay due 

 west of lihapta, or nearly .so, he accordingly gave to the eastern lake the same 

 latitude of 7' S. and to the western 6' vS. And I may here remark that, 

 the position assigned by Ptolemy to Khapta lieing almost exact ("*), we may 

 consider this place as a second centre of observations, such as those above 

 de.scribed as having been carried out for Alexandria. Now, according to the 

 tables, the longitude of Khapta is 71 , and that of the eastern lake is 

 given as 65', the dift'erence (6 ilegrees) being with the leduition 5 , ami that 

 is the difference between the mean longituile of the mouth of the Pangani 

 (39 ) and that of Lake Victoria (33' 15'). The 14 degrees of longitude that 

 extend from the western lake (longitude 57' according to Ptolemj-) to Khapta 

 (71) are reduced to 11 W, and this scarcely exceeds the real ditlerence 

 (39 '-29' 30') by 2' 10'. 



The almost identical restdls at which we ariive by taking as centres of 



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