He Foresaw That Stay-At-Home Geographers,
Who, With A Comfortable Arm-Chair To Sit In, Travel So Easily With Their
Fingers On A Map, Would Ask Him Why He Had Not Gone From Such A Place To
Such A Place?
Why he had not followed the Nile to the Luta N'zige lake,
and from the lake to Gondokoro?
As it happened, it was impossible for
Speke and Grant to follow the Nile from Karuma: the tribes were fighting
with Kamrasi, and no strangers could have gone through the country.
Accordingly they procured their information most carefully, completed
their map, and laid down the reported lake in its supposed position,
showing the Nile as both influent and effluent precisely as had been
explained by the natives.
Speke expressed his conviction that the Luta N'zige must be a second
source of the Nile, and that geographers would be dissatisfied that he
had not explored it. To me this was most gratifying. I had been much
disheartened at the idea that the great work was accomplished, and that
nothing remained for exploration. I even said to Speke, "Does not one
leaf of the laurel remain for me?" I now heard that the field was not
only open, but that an additional interest was given to the exploration
by the proof that the Nile flowed out of one great lake, the Victoria,
but that it evidently must derive an additional supply from an unknown
lake, as it entered it at the NORTHERN extremity, while the body of the
lake came from the south.
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