chap, xil] SOURCES OF THE NILE. 337 
Central Africa towards the north. This was the great 
reservoir of the Nile ! 
The first coup d’ceil from the summit of the cliff 
1,500 feet above the level had suggested what a closer 
examination confirmed. The lake was a vast depression 
far below the general level of the country, surrounded 
by precipitous cliffs, and bounded on the west and 
south-west by great ranges of mountains from five to 
seven thousand feet above the level of its waters—thus 
it was the one great reservoir into which everything 
must drain; and from this vast rocky cistern the 
Nile made its exit, a giant in its birth. It was a grand 
arrangement of Nature for the birth of so mighty and 
important a stream as the river Nile. The Yictoria 
N yanza of Speke formed a reservoir at a high altitude, 
receiving a drainage from the west by the Kitangule 
river, and Speke had seen the MTumbiro mountain at 
a great distance as a peak among other mountains from 
which the streams descended, which by uniting, formed 
the main river Kitangule, the principal feeder of the 
Victoria lake from the west, in about the 2° S. latitude : 
thus the same chain of mountains that fed the Victoria 
on the east must have a watershed to the west and 
north that would flow into the Albert lake. The general 
drainage of the Nile basin tending from south to north, 
and the Albert lake extending much farther north than 
the Victoria, it receives the river from the latter lake, 
and thus monopolizes the entire head-waters of the 
Nile. The Albert is the grand reservoir, while the 
Victoria is the eastern source; the parent streams that 
form these lakes are from the same origin, and the 
Kitangule sheds its waters to the Victoria to be received 
eventually by the Albert, precisely as the highlands of 
MTumbiro and the Blue Mountains pour their northern 
drainage direct into the Albert lake. The entire Nile 
system, from the first Abyssinian tributary the Atbara 
in N. latitude 17° 37' even to the equator, exhibits a 
uniform drainage from S.E. to N.W., every tributary 
flowing in that direction to the main stream of the 
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