54 The Sources of the Nile. 



and swamps, from which it emerges wide, rapid, deep, and 

 navigable. For hundreds of miles all the additions it receives, 

 and they are many and important, seem to do no more than 

 keep it as it was. It remains large and full, but nowhere 

 increases greatly in width, or rapidity of course or depth. 

 After the largest affluents have combined their waters with the 

 main stream there is still little difference. After the longest 

 and most exhausting seasons of drought and incessant evapora- 

 tion from a large surface in a burning climate, the Nile is still 

 full, and often then begins its mysterious and periodic rise. 

 This great mystery of geography, this miracle of Egypt from 

 the earliest occupation of the country to this day, is thus seen 

 to be the result of many circumstances, combining to ensure 

 not only a perpetual water supply, but the required periodical 

 flood at the exact season when it is most useful and least to be 

 expected. 



The general outline of the present great discovery of Captain 

 Speke was certainly more than suggested, both by ancient and' 

 modern geographers — among the former by Ptolemy, and among 

 the latter by Dr. Beke. So loug ago as in 1846, the latter tra- 

 veller, in a memoir read before the meeting of the British 

 Association for that year, " inferred that the head of the Nile 

 is most probably situated in about 2° S. lat. and 34° B. long., 

 at the extreme eastern edge of the table land of Eastern Africa, 

 and at a distance of 300 or 400 miles from the island of 

 Zanzibar." This is the actual position of the Lake Victoria 

 ^'yanza. At the same time Dr. Beke suggested that " there is 

 a third great arm of the Nile, namely, the Bahr-el-Ghazal, 

 which joins the central from the west." The extreme pro- 

 bability of this, and the fact that this arm still remains to be 

 explored, add interest to this opinion, expressed long before the 

 commencement of thoso expeditions that have had so glorious 

 a result. 



it must not be forgotten, in concluding this notice, that 

 the much disputed question of the existence of a group of 

 mountains, called the Mountains of the Moon, again comes 

 before us. Ptolemy, and since his time a multitude of geo- 

 graphers, have placed this supposed range in an east and west 

 direction across Africa, to cross the direction of the Nile at 

 right angles. Instead (if this Hie chain, if it exists, i,s in a 



very different direction, is much shorter than had been sup- 

 posed, and is probably much loftier. There a re, however, two 

 mountain chains that might be so called — one is the extremely 

 lofty and snow-covered group, of which Kilmanjoro is the 

 culminating; summit; the other is the local range recently 

 described by Captain Speke as occurring to the north of 

 Tanganyika. Though nnicli less lofty than the other moun- 





