208 THE LAKE EEGIONS OF CENTEAL AFEICA. 



Far graver considerations lie on the con. side: the reports 

 of the Egyptian expedition, and the dates of the several 

 inundations which — as will presently appear— alone suf- 

 fice to disprove the possibility of the Nyanza causing 

 the flood of the Nile. It is doubtless a satisfactory 

 thing to disclose to an admiring public, of " statesmen, 

 churchmen, missionaries, merchants, and more particu- 

 larly geographers," the " solution of a problem, which 

 it has been the first geographical desideratum of many 

 thousand years to ascertain, and the ambition of the 

 first monarchs in the world to unravel." (Blackwood's 

 Magazine, October 1859.) But how many times since 

 the days of a certain Claudius Ptolemseius surnamed 

 Pelusiota, have not the Fountains of the White Nile 

 been discovered and re-discovered after this fashion ? 



What tended at the time to make me the more 

 sceptical was the substantial incorrectness of the geo- 

 graphical and other details brought back by my com- 

 panion. This was natural enough. Bombay, after 

 misunderstanding his master's ill-expressed Hindostani, 

 probably mistranslated the words into Kisawahili to some 

 travelled African, who in turn passed on the question 

 in a wilder dialect to the barbarian or barbarians under 

 examination. During such a journey to and fro words 

 must be liable to severe accidents. The first thing 

 reported to me was the falsehood of the Arabs at 

 Kazeh, who had calumniated the good Sultan Muhayya, 

 and had praised the bad Sultan Machunda : subsequent 

 inquiries proved their rigid correctness. My com- 

 panion's principal informant was one Mansur Bin Sa- 

 lim, a half-caste Arab, who had been flogged out of 

 Kazeh by his compatriots ; he pronounced Muhayya to 

 to be a " very excellent and obliging person," and of 

 course he was believed. I then heard a detailed account 



