594 
SOURCE OP THE NILE. 
The roots, high out of the soil, keep you constantly look- 
ing down, and shot does no harm to guinea fowls on their 
tops. The climbing plants prevent you from leaving the 
ancient path, and I have heard the soko or gorilla growl- 
ing close by without being able to get a sight of him. 
Their call to each other is like that of a tom-cat. The 
country is mountainous; the light gray granite of the 
hills rises through a bed of new red sand-stone, looking 
like islands in it. Innumerable dells have to be crossed, 
and the mud of Manyuema is awful. Bad water and per- 
petual wetting told on us all by choleraic symptoms and 
emaciation. 
“ The news of the chiefs caused a gold fever at Ujiji, 
and soon a herd numbering 600 muskets made up to us, 
all eager for ivory. I turned back about seven days and 
resolved to remain with the heads of this party during the 
rains. Their people are away and they are as kind to me 
as I could wish. Rest and boiling all the water I used 
have restored me. After this preamble I may add that 
slowly and surely the conviction has crept across my mind 
that all I can in honesty and modesty claim is the re- 
discovery of the source of the Nile, which had sunk into 
oblivion like the circumnavigation of Africa by the Phce- 
necian admiral of one of the Pharaohs, b. c. about 600. 
Herodotus did not believe him because he said that in 
passing around Libya he had the sun on his right hand. 
This to us, who have gone round from east to west, stamps 
his tale as genuine. He put down the sources of the Nile 
and Mountains of the Moon in 10 to 12 degrees south, 
where I found both them and the water-shed. Ptolemy, 
or more probably his predecessors, had received genuine 
though oral information from men who had visited this 
region. This is extremely likely, because the fountains 
and mountains abound where no theorist would put them. 
He makes their waters collect into two lacustrine rivers, 
Tanganyika and Lualaba, extant specimens of those lake 
and river beds known in the south of Africa as melazzo, 
