In his letter to
the 'Herald' he says "These four full-grown gushing fountains,
rising so near each other, and giving origin to four large rivers,
answer in a certain degree to the description given of the
unfathomable fountains of the Nile, by the secretary of Minerva,
in the city of Sais, in Egypt, to the father of all travellers -
Herodotus."
For the information of such readers as may not have the original
at hand, I append the following from Cary's translation of
Herodotus:
***
With respect to the sources of the Nile, no man of all the
Egyptians, Libyans, or Grecians, with whom I have conversed,
ever pretended to know anything, except the registrar* of Minerva's
<*the secretary of the treasury of the goddess Neith, or Athena
as Herodotus calls her:
ho grammatiste:s to:n hiro:n xre:mato:n te:s Athe:naie:s>
treasury at Sais, in Egypt. He, indeed, seemed to be trifling
with me when he said he knew perfectly well; yet his account was
as follows: "That there are two mountains, rising into a sharp
peak, situated between the city of Syene, in Thebais, and
Elephantine. The names of these mountains are the one Crophi,
the other Mophi; that the sources of the Nile, which are bottomless,
flow from between these mountains and that half of the water flows
over Egypt and to the north, the other half over Ethiopia and the
south.
