ROUND LAKE VICTORIA NYANZA. 
183 
the chief was not available, it became evident that 
none of his people could be obtained for the service of 
exploration. Without this insight into Kaduma’s life 
and manners, it would have been a matter for fair 
speculation whether his weakness and intemperance, 
or his dread of the vast lake, were the real causes of 
his reluctance to accompany me. 
The prince was learned in the names of several 
countries or villages — but which they were, I was then 
ignorant. But if every name he repeated to my 
interested ears were the names of real countries, then, 
I began to think, it might be true, as he himself 
believed, that the lake was so large that its exploration 
would occupy years. Nearly all the Wangwana, while 
THE LADY ALICE ” IN SECTIONS. 
the Lady Alice was being prepared for sea, were 
impressed with the vastness of the enterprise, as Prince 
Kaduma, his people, Sungoro, and his slaves — who had 
really only reached Ururi — sketched it to them with 
their superstitious and crude notions of its size. There 
were, they said, a people dwelling on its shores who 
were gifted with tails ; another who trained enormous 
and fierce dogs for war ; another a tribe of cannibals, 
who preferred human flesh to all other kinds of meat. 
The lake was so large it would take years to trace its 
shores, and who then at the end of that time would 
remain alive ? Therefore, as I expected, there were 
no volunteers for the exploration of the Great Lake. 
Its opposite shores, from their very vagueness of outline, 
and its people, from the distorting fogs of misrepresen- 
