The Sources of the Nile. 53 



sence of any rational explanation of many well-known 

 phenomena. All Africa contains but a few rivers of importance, 

 and of these, not one besides the Nile is a first class stream as 

 it enters the sea. The Niger is choked, the Zambesi is choked, 

 and the Zaire is hardly visible. None assume the character of 

 a wide rapid river, pouring an incessant stream, unbroken and 

 unchanged by events going on in the interior of the continent, 

 and hardly one is continuously navigable. 



We are now beginning to see in what the Nile resembles, 

 and in what important points it differs from the other principal 

 rivers of the world and the streams of Africa. Unlike other 

 rivers, for the last thousand miles of its course it receives no 

 tributary. Exposed to the drying winds that have crossed the 

 desert either of Africa or Arabia, it yet preserves its water 

 supply with unvarying regularity, and when the usual season 

 comes it rises rapidly, and overflows a large tract of low flat 

 land. It bears down from the interior of the country a vast 

 amount of mud to fertilize these plains. Silent and inaccessible, 

 for ages the sources of this stream have been looked for, and 

 some mountain system worthy of so gigantic a result has been 

 from the earliest times hypothetically named and described. 

 It is hardly too much to say that no such system exists. 

 Mysteriously generated under the burning and vertical sun 

 of Central Africa, fed by a network of streams draining an 

 extensive, richly wooded, and not lofty table land ; here and 

 there expanding into swamps crowded with the hippopotamus ; 

 at intervals rushing along through ravines, or falling over 

 rocks and ledges ; always large, always fall, always important, 

 this river, a giant from its birth, is the outlet of a group of 

 lakes, and is thus connected with the peculiar drainage system 

 of its continent. As it emerges into the lower land towards 

 the north it is also flanked by the loftiest mountains of the 

 continent, with their summit peaks covered with perpetual 

 snow, and receives from them a supply which never fails, and 

 which is greatest in the greatest heats of the tropical summer. 

 Bat the tropics have no winter ; they may, indeed, be drier at 

 one season than another, but the abundant vegetation observed 

 is the proof and the result of rarely ceasing rain. Thus the 

 Nile combines the sources of supply elsewhere distinct. It is fed 

 by the perpetual tropical rains, but it is fed also by the perpetual 

 melting of mountain snow. It receives perpetual contributions 

 from the south and west, and perennial tribute from the east ; 

 and this rush of water, increased at certain seasons, is, as it 

 were, kept up from point to point along its course in the great 

 swampy flats, as well as in the numerous lakes. As other 

 streams originate in springs or glaciers — as some rush forth 

 from the earth ready formed — so the Nile originates in lakes 



