THE NILE SOURCES. 485 



have cogent reasons for following the painful, plodding investigation to its 

 conclusion. Poor Speke's mistake was a foregone conclusion. When he dis- 

 covered the Victoria Nyanza, he at once leaped to the conclusion that therein 

 lay the sources of the river of Egypt, ' twenty thousand square miles of 

 water,' confused by sheer immensity. 



" Ptolemy's small lake ' Coloc ' is a more correct representation of the 

 actual size of that one of three or four lakes which alone sends its outflow to 

 the north ; its name is Okara. Lake Kavirondo is three days distant from it, 

 but connected by a narrow arm. Lake Naibash or Neibash is four days from 

 Kavirondo. Baringo is ten days distant, and discharges by a river, the Nagar- 

 dabash, to the north-east. 



" These three or four lakes, which have been described by several intel- 

 ligent Suaheli, who have lived for many years on their shores, were run into 

 one huge Victoria Nyanza. But no sooner did Speke and Grant turn their 

 faces to this lake to prove that it contained the Nile fountains, than they 

 turned their backs to the springs of the river of Egypt, which are between 

 four hundred and five hundred miles south of the most southerly portion of 

 the Victoria Lake. Every step of their heroic and really splendid achieve- 

 ment of following the river down took them farther and farther from the 

 sources they sought. But for devotion to the foregone conclusion, the sight 

 of the little ' White Nile,' as unable to account for the great river, they must 

 have turned off to the west down into the deep trough of the great valley, 

 and there found lacustrine rivers amply sufficient to account for the Nile and 

 all its phenomena. 



" The next explorer, Baker, believed as honestly as Speke and Grant, 

 that in the Lake River Albert he had a second source of the Nile to that of 

 Speke. He came farther up the Nile than any other in modern times, but 

 turned when between six hundred and seven hundred miles of the caput Nili. 

 He is now employed in a more noble work than the discovery of Nile sources ; 

 and if, as all must earnestly wish, he succeeds in suppressing the Nile Slave 

 Trade, the boon he will bestow on humanity will be of far higher value than 

 all my sources together. 



" When intelligent men like these and Bruce have been mistaken, I have 

 naturally felt anxious that no one should come after me and find such sources 

 south of mine, which I now think can only be possible by water running up 

 the southern slope of the watershed. 



" But all that can in modern times, and in common modesty, be fairly 

 claimed, is the re-discovery of what had sunk into oblivion, like the circum- 

 navigation of Africa by the Phoenician admiral of one of the Pharaohs, about 

 B. c. 600. He was not believed, because he reported that, in passing round 

 Libya, he had the sun on his right hand. This, to us who have gone round 

 the Cape from east to west, stamps his tale as genuine. 



