Part 17

To the task of tent-making succeeded tailoring. We had neglected to provide ourselves with the loose blanket suits, served out to sailors on board men-of-war in the tropics: they are most useful in passing through countries where changes of climate are sudden and marked. Besides these, the traveller should carry with him an ample store of flannels: the material must be shrunk before making up shirts, otherwise it will behave as did the Little Boy’s mantle when tried by the frail fair Guinever. A red colour should moreover be avoided, the dye soon turns dark, and the appearance excites too much attention. Besides shirt and trousers, the only necessary is a large “stomach-warmer” waistcoat, with sleeves and back of similar material, without collar--which renders sleeping in it uneasy--and provided with four flapped pockets, to contain a compass and thermometer, a note-book, and a sketch-book, a watch and a moderate-sized knife of many uses. The latter should contain scissors, tweezers, tooth-pick, and ear-pick, needle, file, picker, steel for fire, turnscrew, watch-spring-saw, clasp blade, and pen blade: it should be made of moderate dimensions, and for safety be slung by a lanyard to the button-hole. For the cold mornings and the noon-day heats, I made up a large padded hood, bound round the head like the Arab Kufiyah. Too much cannot be said in favour of this article, which in eastward travel defends the eyes from the fiery glare, protects, when wending westwards, the carotids against the solar blaze, and, at all times, checks the intrusive staring of the crowd. I reformed my umbrella, ever an invaluable friend in these latitudes, by removing the rings and wires from the worm-eaten stick, and by mounting them on a spear, thus combining with shelter a staff and a weapon. The traveller should have at least three umbrellas, one large and water proof--white, not black--in the shape of those used by artists; and two others of moderate size, and of the best construction, which should be covered with light-coloured calico, as an additional defence against the sun. At Kazeh I was somewhat deficient in material: my lazy “Jack of all trades,” Valentine, made, however, some slippers of green baize, soled with leather, for me, overalls of American domestics for my companion, and various articles of indigo-dyed cotton for himself and his fellow-servant, who presently appeared tastefully rigged out like Paul and Virginia in “Bengal blue.”

The minor works were not many. The two remaining portmanteaus of the three that had left the Coast were cobbled with goatskins, and were bound with stout thongs. The hammocks, of which half had disappeared, were patched and provided with the Nara, or Indian cotton-tape, which in these climates is better than either reims or cord. To save my eyes the spectacle of moribund fowls, suspended to a porter’s pole, two light cages were made after the fashion of the country, with bent and bound withes. The metal plates, pots, and pans were furbished, and a damaged kettle was mended by a travelling tinker: the asses’ saddles and halters were repaired, and, greatest luxury of all, a brace of jembe or iron hoes was converted into two pairs of solid stirrups, under the vigilant eye of Snay bin Amir. A party of slaves sent to Msene brought back fifty-four jembe, useful as return-presents and blackmail on the down-march: they paid, however, one cloth for two, instead of four. Sallum bin Hamid, the “papa” of the Arabs, sold for the sum of forty dollars a fine half-bred Zanzibar she-ass and foal--there is no surer method of procuring a regular supply of milk on Eastern journeys. My black and white beads being almost useless, he also parted with, as a peculiar favour, seventeen or eighteen pounds of pink-porcelains for forty dollars, and with a Frasibah of coffee, and a similar quantity of sugar for eighty dollars, equal to sixteen pounds sterling. On the 14th July the last Arab caravan of the season left Unyanyembe, under the command of Sayf bin Said el Wardi. As he obligingly offered to convey letters and any small articles which I wished to precede me, and knowing that under his charge effects were far safer than with our own people, I forwarded the useless and damaged surveying instruments, certain manuscripts, and various enclosures of maps, field and sketch-books, together with reports to the Royal Geographical Society.

This excitement over I began to weary of Kazeh. Snay bin Amir and most of the Arabs had set out on an expedition to revenge the murder of old Silim--an event alluded to in a former page, and the place had become dull as a mess-dinner. Said bin Salim, who was ill, who coughed and expectorated, and sincerely pitied himself because he had a cold, became more than usually unsociable: he could enjoy nothing but the society of Brahim, the bawling Baghdadi, and the crowd of ill-flavoured slavery that flocked into the vestibule. My Goanese servant, who connected my aspect with hard labour, avoided it like a pestilence. Already I was preparing to organise a little expedition to K’hokoro and the southern provinces, when unexpectedly,--in these lands a few cries and gun-shots are the only credible precursors of a caravan,--on the morning of the 25th August reappeared my companion.

At length my companion had been successful, his “flying trip” had led him to the northern water, and he had found its dimensions surpassing our most sanguine expectations. We had scarcely, however, breakfasted, before he announced to me the startling fact, that he had discovered the sources of the White Nile. It was an inspiration perhaps: the moment he sighted the Nyanza, he felt at once no doubt but that the “Lake at his feet gave birth to that interesting river which has been the subject of so much speculation, and the object of so many explorers.” The fortunate discoverer’s conviction was strong; his reasons were weak--were of the category alluded to by the damsel Lucetta, when justifying her penchant in favour of the “lovely gentleman,” Sir Proteus:--

“I have no other but a woman’s reason. I think him so because I think him so;”[11]

and probably his sources of the Nile grew in his mind as his Mountains of the Moon had grown under his hand.

[11] The following extract from the Proceedings of the R. Geographical Society, May 9, 1859, will best illustrate what I mean:--

MR. MACQUEEN, F.R.G.S., said the question of the sources of the Nile had cost him much trouble and research, and he was sure there was no material error either in longitude or latitude in the position he had ascribed to them, namely, a little to the eastward of the meridian of 35°, and a little northward of the equator. That was the principal source of the White Nile. The mountains there were exceedingly high, from the equator north to Kaffa Enarea. All the authorities, from east, west, north, or south, now perfectly competent to form judgments upon such a matter, agreed with him; and among them were the officers commanding the Egyptian commission. It was impossible they could all be mistaken. Dr. Krapf had been within a very short distance of it; he was more than 180 miles from Mombas, and he saw snow upon the mountains. He conversed with the people who came from them, and who told him of the snow and exceeding coldness of the temperature. The line of perpetual congelation, it was well known, was 17,000 feet above the sea. He had an account of the navigation of the White Nile by the Egyptian expedition. It was then given as 3° 30′ N. lat. and 31° E. long. At this point the expedition turned back for want of a sufficient depth of water. Here the river was 1370 feet broad, and the velocity of the current _one-quarter_ of a mile per hour. The journals also gave a specific and daily current, the depth and width of the river, and every thing, indeed, connected with it. Surely, looking at the current of the river, the height of the Cartoom above the level of the sea, and the distance thence up to the equator, the sources of the Nile must be 6000 or 8000 feet above the level of the sea, and still much below the line of the snow, which was 6000 or 8000 feet farther above them. He deeply regretted he was unable to complete the diagram for the rest of the papers he had given to the Society, for it was more important than any others he had previously given. It contained the journey over Africa from sea to sea, second only to that of Dr. Livingstone. But all the rivers coming down from the mountains in question, and running south-eastward, had been clearly stated by Dr. Krapf, who gave every particular concerning them. He should like to know what the natives had said was to the northward of the large lake? Did they say the rivers ran out from or into the lake? How could the Egyptian officers be mistaken?

CAPTAIN SPEKE replied. They were not mistaken; and if they had pursued their journey 50 miles farther, they would undoubtedly have found themselves at the northern borders of this lake.

MR. MACQUEEN said that other travellers, Don Angelo for instance, had been within one and a half degree of the Equator, and saw the mountain of Kimborat under the Line, and persisted in the statement, adding, that travellers had been up the river until they found it a mere brook. He felt convinced that the large lake alluded to by Captain Speke was not the source of the Nile: it was impossible it could be so, for it was not at a sufficiently high altitude.

The paper presented to the Society, when fully read in conjunction with the map, will clearly show that the Bahr-el-Abied has no connection with Kilimanjaro, that it has no connection whatever with any lake or river to the south of the Equator, and that the swelling of the river Nile proceeds from the tropical rains of the northern torrid zone, as was stated emphatically to Julius Cæsar by the chief Egyptian priest Amoreis 2000 years ago.

In nearly 3° N. lat. there is a great cataract, which boats cannot pass. It is called Gherba. About half-way (50 miles) above, and between this cataract and Robego, the capital of Kuenda, the river becomes so narrow as to be crossed by a bridge formed by a tree thrown across it. Above Gherba no stream joins the river either from the south or south-west.

The main argument in favour of the Lake representing the great reservoir of the White River was, that the “principal men” at the southern extremity ignored the extent northward. “On my inquiring about the lake’s length the man (the greatest traveller in the place) faced to the north, and began nodding his head to it; at the same time he kept throwing forward his right hand, and making repeated snaps of his fingers endeavoured to indicate something immeasurable; and added, that nobody knew, but he thought it probably extended to the end of the world.” Strongly impressed by this valuable statistical information, my companion therefore placed the northern limit about 4°-5° north lat., whereas the Egyptian expedition sent by the late Mohammed Ali Pacha, about twenty years ago, to explore the Coy Sources, reached 3° 22′ north lat. It therefore ought to have sailed fifty miles upon the Nyanza lake. On the contrary, from information derived on the spot, that expedition placed the fountains at one month’s journey--300 to 350 miles--to the south-east, or upon the northern counterslope of Mount Kenia. Whilst marching to the coast, my companion--he tells us--was assured by a “respectable Sowahili merchant, that when engaged in traffic some years previously to the northward of the line, and the westward of this lake, he had heard it commonly reported that large vessels frequented the northern extremity of these waters, in which the officers engaged in navigating them used sextants and kept a log, precisely similar to what is found in vessels on the ocean. Query, could this be in allusion to the expedition sent by Mohammed Ali up the Nile in former years?” (Proceedings of Royal Geographical Society, May 9, 1859.) Clearly, if Abdullah Bin Nasib, the Msawahili alluded to, had reported these words, he merely erred; the Egyptian expedition, as has been shown, not only did not find, they never even heard of a lake. But not being present at the conversation I am tempted to assign further explanation. My companion, wholly ignorant of Arabic, was reduced to depend upon “Bombay,” who spoke an even more debased dialect than his master, and it is easy to see how the blunder originated. The Arabic bahr and the Kisawahili bahari are equally applicable in vulgar parlance to a river or sea, a lake or a river. Traditions concerning a Western Sea--the to them now unknown Atlantic--over which the white men voyage, are familiar to many East Africans; I have heard at Harar precisely the same report concerning the log and sextants. Either, then, Abdullah Bin Nasib confounded, or my companion’s “interrupter” caused him to confound the Atlantic and the Lake. In the maps forwarded from Kazeh by my companion, the River Kivira was, after ample inquiry, made a western _influent_ of the Nyanza Lake. In the map appended to the paper in Blackwood, before alluded to, it has become an _effluent_, and the only minute concerning so very important a modification is, “This river (although I must confess at first I did not think so) is the Nile itself!”

Beyond the assertion, therefore, that no man had visited the north, and the appearance of sextants and logs upon the waters, there is not a shade of proof _pro._ Far graver considerations lie on the _con._ side: the reports of the Egyptian expedition, and the dates of the several inundations which--as will presently appear--alone suffice to disprove the possibility of the Nyanza causing the flood of the Nile. It is doubtless a satisfactory thing to disclose to an admiring public, of “statesmen, churchmen, missionaries, merchants, and more particularly geographers,” the “solution of a problem, which it has been the first geographical desideratum of many thousand years to ascertain, and the ambition of the first monarchs in the world to unravel.” (Blackwood’s Magazine, October 1859.) But how many times since the days of a certain Claudius Ptolemæius surnamed Pelusiota, have not the Fountains of the White Nile been discovered and re-discovered after this fashion?

What tended at the time to make me the more sceptical was the substantial incorrectness of the geographical and other details brought back by my companion. This was natural enough. Bombay, after misunderstanding his master’s ill-expressed Hindostani, probably mistranslated the words into Kisawahili to some travelled African, who in turn passed on the question in a wilder dialect to the barbarian or barbarians under examination. During such a journey to and fro words must be liable to severe accidents. The first thing reported to me was the falsehood of the Arabs at Kazeh, who had calumniated the good Sultan Muhayya, and had praised the bad Sultan Machunda: subsequent inquiries proved their rigid correctness. My companion’s principal informant was one Mansur Bin Salim, a half-caste Arab, who had been flogged out of Kazeh by his compatriots; he pronounced Muhayya to be a “very excellent and obliging person,” and of course he was believed. I then heard a detailed account of how the caravan of Salim bin Rashid had been attacked, beaten, captured, and detained at Ukerewe, by its sultan Machunda. The Arabs received the intelligence with a smile of ridicule, and in a few days Salim bin Rashid appeared in person to disprove the report. These are but two cases of many. And what knowledge of Asiatic customs can be expected from the writer of these lines? “The Arabs at Unyanyembe had advised my donning their habit for the trip in order to attract less attention; a vain precaution, which I believe they suggested more to gratify their own vanity in _seeing an Englishman lower himself to their position_, than for any benefit that I might receive by doing so.” (Blackwood, loco cit.) This galimatias of the Arabs!--the haughtiest and the most clannish of all Oriental peoples.

But difference of opinion was allowed to alter companionship. After a few days it became evident to me that not a word could be uttered upon the subject of the Lake, the Nile, and his _trouvaille_ generally without offence. By a tacit agreement it was, therefore, avoided, and I should never have resumed it had my companion not stultified the results of the Expedition by putting forth a claim which no geographer can admit, and which is at the same time so weak and flimsy, that no geographer has yet taken the trouble to contradict it.

I will here offer to the reader a few details concerning the Lake in question,--they are principally borrowed from my companion’s diary, carefully corrected, however, by Snay bin Amir, Salim bin Rashid[12], and other merchants at Kazeh.

[12] When my companion returned to Kazeh, he represented Ukerewe and Mazita to be islands, and, although in sight of them, he had heard nothing concerning their connection with the coast. This error was corrected by Salim bin Rashid, and accepted by us. Yet I read in his discovery of the supposed sources of the Nile: “Mansur, and a native, the greatest traveller of the place, kindly accompanied and gave me every obtainable information. This man had traversed the island, as he called it, of Ukerewe from north to south. _But by his rough mode of describing it, I am rather inclined to think that instead of its being an actual island, it is a connected tongue of land, stretching southwards from a promontory lying at right angles to the eastern shore of the lake_, which being a wash, affords a passage to the mainland during the fine season, but during the wet becomes submerged and thus makes Ukerewe temporarily an island.” The information, I repeat, was given, not by the “native,” but by Salim bin Rashid. When, however, the latter proceeded to correct my companion’s confusion between the well-known coffee mart Kitara and “the island of Kitiri occupied by a tribe called Watiri,” he gave only offence--consequently Kitiri has obtained a local habitation in Blackwood and Petermann.

This fresh-water sea is known throughout the African tribes as Nyanza, and the similarity of the sound to “Nyassa,” the indigenous name of the little Maravi or Kilwa Lake, may have caused in part the wild confusion in which speculative geographers have involved the Lake Regions of Central Africa. The Arabs, after their fashion of deriving comprehensive names from local and minor features, call it Ukerewe, in the Kisukuma dialect meaning the “place of Kerewe” (Kelewe), an islet. As has been mentioned, they sometimes attempt to join by a river, a creek, or some other theoretical creation, the Nyanza with the Tanganyika, the altitude of the former being 3750 feet above sea-level, or 1900 feet above the latter, and the mountain regions which divide the two having been frequently travelled over by Arab and African caravans. Hence the name Ukerewe has been transferred in the “Mombas Mission Map” to the northern waters of the Tanganyika. The Nyanza, as regards name, position, and even existence, has hitherto been unknown to European geographers; but, as will presently appear, descriptions of this sea by native travellers have been unconsciously transferred by our writers to the Tanganyika of Ujiji, and even to the Nyassa of Kilwa.

M. Brun-Rollet (“Le Nil Blanc et le Soudan,” p. 209) heard that on the west of the Padongo tribe,--whom he places to the S. of Mount Kambirah, or below 1° S. lat.--lies a great lake, from whose northern extremity issues a river whose course is unknown. In the map appended to his volume this water is placed between 1° S. and 3° N. lat., and about 25° 50′ E. long. (Greenwich), and the déversoir is made an influent of the White Nile.

Bowdich (“Discoveries of the Portuguese,” pp. 131, 132), when speaking of the Maravi Lake (the Nyassa), mentions that the “negroes or the Moors of Melinde” have mentioned a great water which is known to reach Mombaca, which the Jesuit missionaries conjectured to communicate with Abyssinia, and of which Father Lewis Marianna, who formerly resided at Tete, recommended a discovery, in a letter addressed to the government at Goa, which is still preserved among the public archives of that city. Here the confusion of the Nyanza, to which there was of old a route from Mombasah with the Nyassa, is apparent.

At the southern point, where the Muingwira River falls into the tortuous creek, whose surface is a little archipelago of brown rocky islets crowned with trees, and emerging from the blue waters, the observed latitude of the Nyanza Lake, is 2° 24′ S.; the longitude by dead reckoning from Kazeh is E. long. 33° and nearly due north, and the altitude by B. P. thermometer 3750 feet above sea-level. Its extent to the north is unknown to the people of the southern regions, which rather denotes some difficulty in travelling than any great extent. They informed my companion that from Mwanza to the southern frontier of Karagwah is a land journey of one month, or a sea voyage of five days towards the N. N. W. and then to the north. They also pointed out the direction of Unyoro N. 20° W. The Arab merchants of Kazeh have seen the Nyanza opposite Weranhanja, the capital district of Armanika, King of Karagwah, and declare that it receives the Kitangure River, whose mouth has been placed about the equator. Beyond that point all is doubtful. The merchants have heard that Suna, the late despot of Uganda, built matumbi, or undecked vessels, capable of containing forty or fifty men, in order to attack his enemies, the Wasoga, upon the creeks which indent the western shores of the Nyanza. This, if true, would protract the lake to between 1° and 1° 30′ of N. lat., and give it a total length of about 4° or 250 miles. This point, however, is still involved in the deepest obscurity. Its breadth was estimated as follows. A hill, about 200 feet above the water-level, shows a conspicuous landmark on the eastern shore, which was set down as forty miles distant. On the south-western angle of the line from the same point ground appeared; it was not, however, perceptible on the north-west. The total breadth, therefore, has been assumed at eighty miles,--a figure which approaches the traditions unconsciously chronicled by European geographers. In the vicinity of Usoga the lake, according to the Arabs, broadens out: of this, however, and in fact of all the formation north of the equator, it is at present impossible to arrive at certainty.