646 
TIIB WATERSHED OP THE NILE. 
sending this safely to the coast by a friend; but so many 
of my letters have disappeared at Unyanyembc when en- 
trusted to the care of the Lcuale, or Governor, who is 
merely the trade agent of certain Banians, that I shall con- 
sider that of the 28th as one of the unfortunates, and give 
in this as much as 1 can recall. 
I have ascertained that the watershed of the Nile is a 
broad upland between ten degrees and twelve degrees south 
latitude, and from -1000 to 5000 feet above the level of the 
sea. Mountains stand on it at various points, which, though 
apparently not very high, are between 6000 and 1000 feet 
of actual altitude. The watershed is over 100 miles in 
length from west to east. The springs that rise on it are 
almost innumerable — that is, it would take a large part of 
a man’s life to count them. A bird’s eye view of some 
parts of the watershed would resemble the frost vegetation 
on window panes. They all begin in an ooze at the head 
of a slightly depressed valley. A few hundred yards down 
the quantity of water from oozing earthen sponge forms a 
brisk perennial burn or brook a few feet broad, and deep 
enough to require a bridge. These are the ultimate or 
primary sources of the great rivers that flow to the north 
in the great Nile valley. The primaries unite and form 
streams in general larger than the Isis at Oxford, or Avon 
at Hamilton, and may be called secondary sources. They 
never dry, but unite again into four large lines of drainage, 
the head waters or mains of the river of Egypt. These 
four are each called by the natives Lualaba, which, if not 
too pedantic, may be spoken of as lacustrine rivers, extant 
specimens of those which in prehistoric times abounded in 
Africa, and which in the south are still called by Bechua- 
nas " Melapo,” in the north, by Arabs, “ Wadys ; ” both 
words meaning the same thing — riverbed in which no water 
ever flows. Two of the four great, rivers mentioned fall 
into the central Lualaba, or Webb’s Lake River, and then 
we have but two main lines of drainago as depicted nearly 
by Ptolemy 
