122 
WESTWARD TO LAKE VICTORIA NYANZA 
flows out of the Great Lake, it is at once on the easiest line of water 
communication with Lake Albert and the Soudan, and also a place 
where great waterpower is available. In years to come the shores 
of this splendid bay may be crowned with long rows of comfortable 
tropical villas and imposing offices, and the gorge of the Nile crowded 
with factories and warehouses. There is power enough to gin all 
the cotton and saw all the wood in Uganda, and it is here that one 
of the principal emporia of tropical produce will certainly be created. 
In these circumstances it is a pity to handicap the town with an out¬ 
landish name. It would be much better to call it Ripon Falls, after 
the beautiful cascades which lie beneath it, and from whose force its 
future prosperity will be derived. 
“The Ripon Falls are, for their own sake, well worth a visit. 
The Nile springs out of the Victoria Nyanza, a vast body of water 
nearly as wide as the Thames at Westminster Bridge, and this impos¬ 
ing river rushes down a stairway of rock from fifteen to twenty feet 
deep, in smooth, swirling slopes of green water. It would be per¬ 
fectly easy to harness the whole river and let the Nile begin its long 
and beneficent journey to the sea by leaping through a turbine. It 
is possible that nowhere else in the world could so enormous a mass 
of water be held up by so little masonry. Two or three short dams 
from island to island across the falls would enable, at an incon¬ 
ceivably small cost, the whole level of the Victoria Nyanza—over 
an expanse of a hundred and fifty thousand square miles—to be gradu¬ 
ally raised six or seven feet; would greatly increase the available 
water-power; would deepen the water in Kavirondo Bay, so as to 
admit steamers of much larger draught; and, finally, would enable 
the lake to be maintained at a uniform level, so that immense areas 
of swampy foreshore, now submerged, now again exposed, according 
to the rainfalls, would be converted either into clear water or dry 
land.” 
As we have described the natives of the Rift Valley, a brief 
account, from the pen of Sir Harry Johnston, of some of those who 
dwell in the vicinity of the Great Lake will not be without interest. 
Those who reach this region before civilization has done away with 
the customs of its native inhabitants “will see before them coal-black 
