524 
THE SOURCES OF THE NILE. 
stead of men, forced mo, to my great grief, to leave as the 
Unknown Lake. By my reckoning, the chronometers being 
all dead, it is five degrees of longitude west of Speke’s 
position at Ujiji. This makes it probable that the great 
lacustrine river in the valley is the western branch of 
Petherick’s Nile, the Baker Ghazal, and not the eastern 
branch which Speke, Grant, and Baker believed to be the 
river of Egypt. If correct, this would make it the Nile, 
only, after all, the Baker Ghazal enters the eastern arm. 
But though I found a watershed between ten degrees and 
twelve degrees south — that is a long way further up the 
valley than any one had dreamed — and saw the streams of 
some six hundred miles of it conveying into the centre of 
the great valley, no one knew where it went after that de- 
parture of Lake Moero. Some conjectured that it went 
into Tanganyika; but I saw that to do so, it must run up 
hill. Others imagined that it might flow into the Atlantic. 
It was to find out where it did actually go that took mo 
into Manyema. I could get no information from traders 
outside, and no light could be obtained from the Manyema 
within. They never travel, and it was so of old. They 
consist of petty licadmanships, and each hugs his grievance 
from some old feud, and is worse than our old Highland 
ancestors. Every head man of a hamlet would like to see 
every other ruling blockhead slain ; but all were kind to 
strangers, and though terrible fellows among themselves, 
with their large spears and huge wooden shields, they were 
never known to injure foreigners till slavers tried the effects 
of gunshots upon them, and captured their women and 
children. As I could get no geographical information 
from them, I had to feel my way and grope in the intermi- 
nable forests and prairies, and three times took the wrong 
direction, going northerly, not knowing that the great river 
makes immense sweeps to the west and southwest. I felt 
as if I were running my head against a stone wall. It 
might, after all, turn out to be the Congo, and who would 
risk being eaten and converted into black man for it ? I 
