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Mahometan, and opened the eyes of Europe to the fictions which had been circulated about the mysterious city. The glories of Timbuctoo, which once boasted its scholars and authors, had faded away. No golden roofs and grand streets, "but," says Caillié, a mass of ill-looking houses built of earth;" "situated in an immense plain of white sand," where "all nature wore a dreary aspect," amid "the most profound silence;""not even the warbling of a bird was to be heard." The fall of Morocco had brought down Timbuctoo, and little but ruins were left of its former prosperity. So recently as 1870 the French Government erected, on the banks of the African river, Nunez, a monument to Caillié.

But we are forgetting Lieutenant Denham and Captain Clapperton, who by a few years preceded Caillié, and, along with Dr. Oudney, were sent (1822) to Central Africa, to trace the course and find the termination of the Niger. Dr. Oudney died early on the journey (1824). They went from Tripoli and discovered Lake Tchad, where were enormous cities with weekly markets, attended by a hundred thousand people, who went there to buy and sell Manchester cotton goods, Saxony cloth, guns, raw silk, tea, sugar, fancy ware, writing paper, and many other articles. All this was unknown to Europeans, and people could scarcely realise the fact that, in these desert wilds, negroes might be seen riding about the streets on horseback, clad in mail, and others busily studying Plato and Aristotle in Arabic; but it was all confirmed by Dr. Barth, as well as by Mohammed el Tounsy. Clapperton died at Sockatoo, the capital of the Foula Empire. Denham made two journeys, and came out on the last in the Bight of Benin, but died of dysentery near the coast (1827), having, like Caillié, done nothing towards settling the question of the mouth of the Niger. All that had been accomplished at present was done by Mungo Park, who had found that the river was neither the Gambia nor the Senegal, and that its course was eastward. Public opinion was all confusion and muddle. Park believed that it was the Congo, into the mouth of which Stanley lately entered from the Lualaba, west of Tanganyika; others pinned their faith on Herodotus, and said it joined the Nile; Major Rennell believed it ran, like many African rivers, into a swamp; and a shrewd German geographer, Reichard, held the opinion that after some distance Nilewards it turned sharply back westwards and emptied into the Bight of Benin. This conjecture was generally rejected, but turned out in the end to be the true one, though other expeditions went out before the truth was discovered. From Morocco, Roentgen plunged into the dark abyss, and was murdered near Mogadore. Nicholls, strangely enough, started on his search at one of the mouths of the river he was seeking, dying three months after reaching the continent. The celebrated Italian explorator, who caused the colossal bust now in the British Museum to be trans

ported from Egypt, started for the interior from the Bight of Benin (1823), but he died not far from the coast. Several large expeditions went out, one under Major Gray, which did nothing; another from the Congo, conducted by Tuckey, nearly every man of which died. Everybody seemed afflicted with negrophobia, and the famous Leyden and Niebuhr talked of going, but did not, to the great satisfaction of their friends.

Clapperton had a servant with him when he died at Sockatoo, named Lander, who made his way home by a new route, bringing back information that plainly showed the Niger mouth to be in the Bight of Benin. At Boussa, Lander fell in with some books and guns of Mungo Park's, but none of Park's papers could be found. Going down the Niger hence, with his brother, on a second visit (1830), they soon found it flowed seaward, and in a few days they saw men in soldiers' jackets, and others in canoes with the Union Jack flying. Then appeared men in European clothes, with six-pounder guns on board. Lander was taken prisoner by these disguised Eboes. Some respectable trading Maslem priests interceded for the Landers, and they were ransomed by King Boy, of Brass, whom the Landers promised to reimburse. At length they reached the river mouth, settling for ever the question of the course and termination of the great Niger. This river, then, rises behind Sierra Leone, flows north-east, passes close by Timbuctoo, over a portion of the Sahara; changing its course by turning to the right and flowing eastwards as if going to the Nile, it again curves round, doubles back upon itself, flows in the direction of the ocean near where it started, and then runs downward into the Gulf of Guinea, near the Bight of Benin. Lander was afterwards killed in the delta of the river by the natives.

The population on the banks of the Niger is immense, and the river opens up a vast field for European commerce. Its length is about 2,500 miles; its width varies from 1,000 to 3,000, or 3,500 yards, and it empties by twenty-two mouths, the delta forming a vast forest of mangroves. At about one hundred miles from its mouth, it receives an inmense tributary-the Binué-which comes from the east, but the source of which at present remains a mystery. A considerable trade is carried on up as far as the confluence of this river; and above this point lies one of the largest cotton-growing regions in the world. The people here have a kind of Eastern civilisation, dress themselves, and weave their own cotton; but once trade is fairly established, they will see it to their advantage to export the raw material and buy the cotton goods of Lancashire.

Practically, the Niger fever ended with the Landers; though Oldfield, Laird, Baikie, Barth, Rohlfs, Nachtigal, and Vogel explored its banks in one region or other, but added little beyond details to our previous

information. It is not now fashionable to explore the Niger, for the Nile has eclipsed it, and engages all interests.

The sources and courses of the Nile within a very recent period have been discovered. This river starts, as far as at present known, by two streams, one coming out of Lake Victoria Nyanza, the other out of Lake Albert Nyanza, two immense equatorial sheets of water fed by almost constant tropical rains. The rivers join near the starting-point of that from Lake Albert; or rather, the Victoria stream enters Albert lake not far from the point where the Albert stream emerges, at the northern extremity of the Albert lake, after the river flowing out of Lake Victoria has pursued a course northward, through Lake Ibrahim, first navigated by Sir S. Baker, of from three hundred to four hundred miles, and then, as one stream, takes a pretty straight course through the Madi country, on to Gondokoro, thence onward through Nubia and Egypt into the Mediterranean at Cairo.* Through the greater part of its course it swarms with crocodiles and hippopotami, and often its banks for miles are huge marshes of mud reeking with malaria, and covered with a rank and impenetrable vegetation of rushes, papyrus, lilies, and many other weeds. Egypt has no other rivers, all streams else being lost in a desert of sand. The great and constant supply from the two great lakes, however, are sufficient of themselves to keep the river alive through the year. But the lakes would give no overflow to the Nile, the waters of which roll on with a clearness that gives the river to the west its name of White Nile, until it reaches th latitudes where the waters come dark and muddy chiefly from the hils of Abyssinia, where the tributary stream to the east is called the "Blue" or "Black Nile." But where are the overflow waters, without which Egypt would soon perish in her sands? They come in the Blue Nile, the Atbara, and others, in overwhelming floods during the rainy season from the great hills of Abyssinia. These rivers, from the African Alps, in the dry season are merely burning sand-courses, but they pour down in raging torrents when the rains set in on those Eastern heights, bringing with them tens of thousands of tons of black mud, and decaying vegetable matter to scatter over the Egyptian sand-desert, which is thus turned into a beautiful garden. These floods come with most impressive suddenness. One day the beds of these rivers are parched up with a burning sun, the next they are filled with frightful, rushing, roaring deluges, which tear up all before them, and drive all living land-animals from their banks. On one occasion Sir S. Baker narrowly escaped, through hearing the raging, roaring floods in the long distance.

Bruce was the first to begin the search for the sources of the Nile. He imagined he had found them in the fountains of the streams which

Colonel Long claims to have discovered Lake Ibrahim in 1874. See his "Central Africa," 1876, chap. xiii. pp. 163–171.

come from the Switzerland of Africa, and was greatly rejoiced. An honest, brave man, and a man of education and learning, he found out on reaching England, after a long sojourn in Abyssinia, that he had made a mistake. He was disgracefully treated by all the world when he told of his discoveries and adventures. Everybody ridiculed him, and threw the strange scenes he had related in his face as jokes. In coffeehouses and taverns he was lampooned by literary hacks, and even Dr. Johnson was led away by the crowd. They rated him about his having seen men who cut steaks from the rumps of living oxen for dinner, and Peter Pinder badgered him with doggerel verse, which, among other things said

"Nor have I been where men (what loss, alas !)

Kill half a cow and turn the rest to grass."

Yet Burton, or Sir S. Baker (we forget which for the moment), saw the practice with his own eyes only a few years back. So disgusted and disheartened was Bruce, that he did not publish his work on Abyssinia for many years after his return home; but his integrity and strict truthfulness have since been amply vindicated.*

The Geographical Society did for the Nile what the African Association did for the Niger. The work of exploration commenced from Egypt as a basis. An Austrian Catholic Mission was early at Gondokoro, but has effected little, except burying its missionaries there. A lady, Miss Tinné, afterwards murdered on her way to Timbuctoo, was the first to navigate a steamer so far up the river as Gondokoro. For a long time it seemed impossible to get farther south, and attention was directed to the east coast as a starting-point. Dr. Krapf and Mr. Rebmann had made journeys inland from Mombas, near Zanzibar, and had discovered the snow-capped mountains of Kenia and Kilimandjaro. The last mountain was climbed amid much danger, and ice brought to its base by the brave and resolute missionary, the Rev. C. New, who subsequently lost his valuable life through the scoundrel plunderer, called a chief, who rules at the base of Kilimandjaro, and who ought yet to be taught by some one that he cannot be allowed to abuse peaceable and good men with impunity. Hearing of a great interior lake, these Mombas men communicated with the Geographical Society, which sent out Lieutenant Burton, a man rather prosy, with a good deal of culture, and hardly less conceit, and who appears to have a specially lively

* Abyssinia, or Ethiopia proper, was first a colony, then, under the Pharaohs, a military province of Egypt. At length it won its independence and contested its superiority over the now declining people on the delta of the Nile. After the fall of Egypt, through the Persian conquests, Ethiopia fell back into African barbarism; but in the third century the Abyssinians were converted to Christianity-a Christianity, however, so distorted and disfigured as hardly to be preferred to paganism. The Jesuits tried their hand before Bruce's time, but were expelled the country.

grudge against Christian missions. Burton was an excellent Oriental scholar, and familiar with Eastern customs. Indeed, he had made a pilgrimage to Mecca and Medina, and had looked at the Prophet's tomb.

We may digress a moment to look at Burton in this relation, for he has done a good deal of exploring both on the east and west side of Africa, and indeed he has penetrated to the central regions. But the Mecca business required a good deal at his hands. He had to turn Mahometan, profess devout adherence to Islamism, and adapt all his conversation and conduct to the new faith he had professed to swallow. How far this is creditable or honest-perhaps it is clever we leave the reader to settle. Of course, besides drinking of the saltish but sacred waters of the well of Zemzem, kissing the famous "Black Stone" of ancient idolatrous Arabs and modern immovable Mussulmans, and throwing stones at the prince of darkness in the valley of Mina, his daily life, one would think, must have been a thing of unreality and untruth, which most Englishmen, let alone Christian Englishmen (leave out the consideration of Caillié), would scarcely have relished. It seems to us that Burton must have passed months, all the while looking serious, and feigning Mussulman piety; giving free board and lodging to vermin, which no one is allowed to slay in the holy cities, and in daily consort with Islam dirt and devotion, rags and ritual, cheating and chastity. Men of the world will see tact in all this and wonderful adaptive genius, and perhaps it might be the thing for the Geographical Society; but if Africa must be civilised, not to name Christianised, it must have men sent to it who are too real to do this kind of masquerading.

Burton took Lieutenant Speke with him into Central Africa, and having reached the shores of Tanganyika lake, they returned. Burton was then taken ill, and sent Speke to seek another lake, which had been reported to them as lying northward. Speke discovered Lake Victoria Nyanza, and declared to Burton it was the true source of the Nile. Burton had no faith in this conjecture; but Speke afterwards went out again, along with Grant, found his conjecture trae, crossed Africa from Zanzibar, viá Ujiji and the lake regions, and reached home by Alexandria. The narrative of his journey is a thrilling one, and ranks amongst the most important in this great enterprise, though Burton appears particularly wishful to share the honours with him. Poor Speke, soon after arriving in England, accidentally shot himself while out sporting. On his way home he met, at Gondokoro, Sir S. Baker, who, with his wife, was on the same errand as Speke. Though Speke had forestalled him, he told Sir Samuel (then Mr., we believe) of reports he had heard of another great body of water to the west of the Victoria Nyanza, of the truth of which he had no doubt. Away went Sir Samuel and his brave and hardy wife, and eventually they came on the other great Nile source in the Albert Nyanza. His narrative, which recounts