The greatest geographical secret after the discovery of America

 Prologue

No unexplored region in our times, neither the heights of the Himalayas, the Antarctic wastes, nor even the hidden side of the moon, has excited quite the same fascination as the mystery of the sources of the Nile. For 2,000 years at least the problem was debated and remained unsolved; every expedition that was sent up the river from Egypt returned defeated. By the middle of the nineteenth century — barely a hundred years ago — this matter had become, in Harry Johnston’s phrase, ‘the greatest geographical secret after the discovery of America’.

The scope of this book is limited to the years between 1856 and 1900, and so we need do no more here than mention very briefly the early history of the river. Almost certainly the ancient Egyptians knew the Nile valley from the Mediterranean as far as the present city of Khartoum, where the Blue Nile comes in from the Ethiopian mountains. Probably they knew something of the Blue Nile as well. But the further course of the parent stream, the White Nile, south of Khartoum, remained a matter of endless speculation, and it interested every distinguished geographer of his age.

This was something more than an ordinary field of exploration. In these deserts the river was life itself. Had it failed to flow, even for one season, then all Egypt perished. Not to know where the stream came from, not to have any sort of guarantee that it would continue — this was to live in a state of insecurity where only fatalism of superstition could reassure the mind.

But there is no record of the river’s ever having failed. The great brown flood came pouring out of the desert for ever, and no one could explain why it was that it should rise and flow over its banks in the Nile Delta in September, the driest and hottest time of the year on the Mediterranean littoral; nor how it was possible for the river to continue in its lower reaches for well over 1,000 miles through one of the most frightful of all deserts without receiving a single tributary and hardly a drop of rain.

About 460 B.C. Herodotus ascended the Nile as far as the first cataract at Assuan before turning back, having found it quite impossible to obtain definite information about the source of the river. There existed merely a vague notion that it arose from ‘fountains’ somewhere in the interior of Africa. The Emperor Nero sent two centurions with an expedition into the wastes of Nubia, as the Sudan was then called, but they returned unsuccessful, saying that they had been blocked in the far interior by an unpenetrable swamp. Through the centuries that followed China became known to Europe, America and Australia were discovered, and the land masses and the oceans of the world were mapped and charted very much as they are today. But still, in 1856, the centre of Africa and its inner mystery, the source of the White Nile, remained almost as much an enigma as it was in the time of Herodotus.

James Bruce traced the course of the shorter Blue Nile from its source to Khartoum in the 1770s, but by 1856 even the most determined of explorers on the White Nile had not been able to get beyond the neighbourhood of the present township of Juba, on latitude 5 degrees north. At that point they were still nowhere near the source of the river. Cataracts, vast forests of papyrus reeds, malarial fever, the fierce tropical heat, the opposition of the pagan tribes — all these combined to prevent any further progress south. By now that impenetrable blank space in the centre of the continent had become filled in imagination with a thousand monstrosities, dwarf men and cannibals with tails, animals as strange as the fabulous griffin and the salamander, huge inland seas, and mountains so high they defied all nature by bearing on their crests, in this equatorial heat, a mantle of perpetual snow.

There was at least a little tenuous evidence to support some of these speculations. One of the most persistent legends about the source of the Nile concerned itself with a journey that had not been made upon the river at all, but overland, from the east coast of Africa a little to the north of Zanzibar. According to this legend a man named Diogenes, a Greek merchant, claimed that in the middle of the first century A.D. he was returning home from a visit to India and had landed on the African mainland at a place called Rhapta (which might have been the site of the present settlement of Pangani in Tanganyika). From Rhapta, Diogenes said, he had ‘travelled inland for a 25-days’ journey and arrived in the vicinity of two great lakes, and the snowy range of mountains whence the Nile draws its twin sources’.

This, at all events, is the story as it was recorded at the time by the Syrian geographer Marinus of Tyre, and it was from the records of Marinus that Ptolemy, the greatest of geographers and astronomers of his time, produced in the middle of the second century A.D. his celebrated map. It shows the course of the Nile reaching directly southward from the Mediterranean to the Equator, and the river is made to arise from two round lakes. The lakes in turn are watered from a high range of mountains, the Lunae Montes, the Mountains of the Moon.

For 1,700 years Ptolemy’s map remained a geographical curiosity, endlessly disputed yet seldom absolutely discredited. But then in 1848 Johann Rebmann, one of the earliest missionaries in East Africa, came forward with a sensational report that he himself, like the ancient Diogenes, had journeyed inland from the East African coast and had seen a vast mountain called Kilimanjaro with snow on its summit. This story was immediately ridiculed in London by a certain Desborough Cooley, a member of the Royal Geographical Society, who protested that it was impossible for snow to remain unmelted on the Equator; what Rebmann had seen was the sun shining on white rock. In the following year, however, another missionary, Johann Ludwig Krapf, claimed that he had seen from a distance a second snow-capped peak, Mount Kenya, somewhat to the north of Kilimanjaro. Still another missionary, J. J. Erhardt, produced a map which showed a large inland lake which he called the ‘Sea of Uniamesi’. By the early 1850s there was other evidence as well that led to a renewal of interest in Ptolemy’s map: the Arab slave and ivory traders, returning to Zanzibar from the far interior, spoke of two great lakes there, one the Ujiji and the other the Nyanza. In addition there were reports of a third lake, the Nyasa, farther to the south.

All this was extremely vague and confusing. Were all these lakes in reality one lake? Were Kilimanjaro and Kenya the legendary Mountains of the Moon, or was there another range farther inland? And how did both lakes and mountains fit into the supposed pattern of the Nile?

It was in order to find the answer to these questions that two explorers, Richard Francis Burton and John Hanning Speke, set off for Africa in 1856. They rejected the route that followed the Nile upstream from Egypt, and decided instead to strike westward from Zanzibar into the dark interior where no white men had ever been before.

With this new expedition the great age of Central African exploration began.

***

The Vales of Paradise

THERE ARE no written records of Uganda — the territory that Speke now proposed to enter — before the middle of the nineteenth century. Sir John Gray describes its history as being like ‘a crime to which there have been no eye-witnesses’. It seems certain, however, that at some point in the unrecorded past a superior race of cattle-owning men came south from the Ethiopian highlands, and these people set themselves up as a ruling aristocracy among the Negroes on the northern and western borders of Lake Victoria. By 1860 three separate kingdoms were established, Bunyoro in the north, Buganda in the centre, and Karagwe to the south, on the western shore of the lake. Many other tribal formations existed as well, but these three little states had a certain coherency in the midst of a wilderness of utter barbarity; they formed, as it were, a tiny capsule of semi-civilization in the centre of the continent, and the outside world knew hardly anything at all about them.

A single Arab trader named Ahmed bin Ibrahim had penetrated into Buganda in the 1840s, and a few others had reached Karagwe, but that was all: no white man had ever been there, no notion of other worlds and other ways of life disturbed the inhabitants. They could scarcely have been more isolated had they been living on the surface of the moon.

Normally in Central Africa it was the fate of such people to remain in a state of arrested development. In a mysterious way the light of human ambition was extinguished, the villages stayed chained to the Stone Age, and from century to century life revolved in an endless ant-like cycle of crude customs and traditions. There was no curiosity to explore, no desire for change or improvement. Every new generation gave way to the same passive fatalistic acceptance of things as they were, and reason was suffocated by habit and superstition.

But with these three puppet kingdoms it was not like this at all; they advanced marvellously. Without any precedent to guide them or any outside help they had achieved by the middle of the nineteenth century a native culture which was well in advance of any other south of the Sahara. And yet the extraordinary thing about these people is not that they should have got so far but that their progress should have been so irregular. They did well in one direction only to fail completely in another, they left enormous gaps behind them, and the most barbarous customs survived in the midst of an exceptional sophistication.

Their houses, for example, had nothing in common with the dull coffin-shaped contraptions of Tanganyika; they were large, beautifully made conical structures of tightly woven canes and reeds that often soared fifty feet into the air. These dwellings were dry and comfortable in the rain and cool in the hot seasons, and they were infinitely more attractive than any building that has been erected in Uganda in the twentieth century. The musical instruments of the tribesmen — their drums, harps, and trumpets — were equally remarkable, and they travelled on the lake in immense canoes, some of them seventy feet in length.

Their basketware was so finely woven it would hold water, and they had discovered the art of making a soft and durable cloth from the bark of trees. No man attended the court of his king unclothed: in fact, in Buganda it was a criminal offence to do so; he wore sandals on his feet, his body was completely covered by a long and graceful toga, and sometimes this was surmounted by a cape of antelope skins which had been pieced together with the skill of a Parisian seamstress.

Neither men nor women disfigured their bodies with scars or tattoos like the other Central African tribes, and when they sat down to eat they washed their hands, either by squeezing a wet napkin or by pouring water over them from a jug. Domestic slaves, who were treated as part of the household like Russian serfs, served the meal, and the food was distinctly civilized: a kind of gruel made from coarse bananas, fish and meat stews, chickens, sweet potatoes, maize, and wild sugarcane. Coffee beans were chewed as a digestive and they brewed their beer from bananas. Both men and women smoked.

In Buganda especially, the richest and most progressive of the three states, the power of the king was absolute, but he was advised by a group of counsellors who formed a kind of cabinet in which each man had some special duty. Thus there was the vizier or prime minister, the treasurer, the commander-in-chief of the army and the admiral of the fleet of war-canoes on the lake, the chief executioner, and others with more picturesque titles such as the chief brewer and the keeper of the drums. These men, together with the provincial chiefs, formed a hierarchy of nobles, and they were obliged to be in constant attendance on the king in his court. Here the etiquette was elaborate. No man could sit down in the king’s presence, be incorrectly dressed, or speak without permission. Whenever the king appeared it was customary for the courtiers to abase themselves on the ground before him, since he was considered to be almost divine, or at all events the personification of the spirit of the race.

And yet, with all this sophistication and refinement, these people had no method of writing or counting, no means of measuring the passage of time by weeks or months or years, no mechanical contrivances even as simple as the plough or the wheel, no religion that amounted to more than the most primitive kind of superstition and witchcraft. They gave way to their passions and their appetites like spoiled and delinquent children and they were unbelievably cruel. From time to time they seem to have been seized with a wild and frantic hysteria, and it was common practice for both men and women to drink themselves into a drunken stupor.

There were strong differences between the three kingdoms, and perhaps these differences were conditioned by the geographical nature of the country. Bunyoro, to the north, is drier and harsher than the land around the shores of Lake Victoria. For months at a time no rain falls and one travels for miles through a dry hard scrub which is not unlike Central Tanganyika. The people here have a reputation for toughness and resilience; they are less sophisticated than the lakeside inhabitants, but more warlike and aggressive. These qualities were certainly reflected in their King, Kamrasi. He was a man who was both harsh and suspicious, a chieftain with the instincts of a pirate, and the absorbing hatred of his life was directed partly against Buganda in the south, and partly against a rebellious brother called Rionga, who lived on an island in the Nile.

Karagwe, on the western side of the lake, is more open country, much of it 5,000 feet above sea-level, and there is a remarkable freshness and clarity in the landscape. A century ago large herds of cattle grazed across the sweeping grassy plains, and along the shores of the lake itself there are scenes that remind one of the downs in southern England: high, sharp cliffs fall sheer into the water, and except for the heat, the emptiness of land, and the tropical islands off-shore this might be Folkestone or Dover. At one time this was fine country for wild animals: thousands of elephants, giraffes, buffaloes, antelopes, and rhinoceroses roamed about, and even now, by night, one can watch the hippopotamuses come ashore from the lake to browse like dark lumbering ghosts on the water’s edge.

Here, at a place called Bweranyange, Rumanika, the King of Karagwe, kept his little provincial court. He was a large and friendly man who had the reputation of being hospitable to strangers. Being by some way the weakest of the three kings, Rumanika took care to remain on good terms with the rulers of Bunyoro and Buganda. He sent them gifts from time to time and even acknowledged himself to be a vassal or at any rate a dependant of Buganda. Yet Rumanika had his eccentricities. He kept an extraordinary harem of wives who were so fat they could not stand upright, and instead grovelled like seals about the floors of their huts. Their diet was an uninterrupted flow of milk that was sucked from a gourd through a straw, and if the young girls resisted this treatment they were force-fed like the pâté de foie gras ducks of Strasbourg: a man stood over them with a whip.

Buganda, on the northern shore of the lake, has neither the dryness of Bunyoro nor the horizons of Karagwe; it is a region of jungles and broken hills and it is as lush and exuberant as Zanzibar. The climate is hot, changeable, and damp, and all things spring from the earth in a blaze of exotic colour. The earth itself is red, the plantations of bananas make avenues that are filled with a warm greenish-yellowish light, and the surrounding jungle is a vast aviary filled with tropical birds and flowering shrubs. These conditions create an impression of intimacy, of quickness and liveliness, and of a kind of luxurious excitement, and that is the nature of the Baganda.

In 1860 Mutesa, the young king of Buganda, had only recently got his grip upon the throne and had established his capital a few miles inland from the lake on a hilltop which is not far from the modern city of Kampala. The traveller came into the town on a broad earthen road cut through the jungle and saw, scattered about the hillsides, a settlement of gracefully proportioned round huts with crowds of people moving about between them. The women for the most part went naked or wore a short cloth around their waists, but the men in their togas reminded one, Harry Johnston1 says, of saints — they ‘recalled irresistibly the conventional pictures of evangelical piety which represented the Blessed walking in the vales of Paradise’.Mutesa’s court was a compound of especially spacious huts in the centre of the town, and here he held his daily levées, sitting upon a platform of grass covered with a red blanket, and surrounded by his nobles, his pages, and his wives, who numbered a couple of hundred or so. At this time he was a slim, well-built young man in his early twenties with beautiful teeth and liquid, but rather striking eyes. His tonsured hair was built up like a cockscomb on his head, his toga was neatly knotted over one shoulder, and on his arms and legs he wore broad bands of coloured beads. At his feet were his symbols of royalty, a spear, a shield, and a white dog. When he went walking the whole court followed, and he affected an extraordinary stiff-legged strut which was meant to imitate the gait of a lion. In the manner of Queen Victoria he did not look round when he chose to sit down; a chair was automatically placed in readiness for him, except that in his case it was a page crouching on his hands and knees. When he chose to speak the courtiers listened in a strained and respectful silence and then, in a body, threw themselves on to the ground, uttering over and over again a curious cry that sounded like ‘n’yanzig’, and was meant to indicate both gratitude and the deepest humility. Mutesa, in short, was a very impressive figure, even at this early stage of his long career, and there might even have been a certain dignity about him had it not been for the fact that he was very far from being a saint in the vales of Paradise; he was a savage and bloodthirsty monster.

Hardly a day went by without some victim being executed at his command, and this was done wilfully, casually, almost as a kind of game. A girl would commit some breach of etiquette by talking too loudly, a page would neglect to close or open a door, and at once, at a sign from Mutesa, they would be taken away, screaming, to have their heads lopped off. A roll of drums obliterated the cries of the death-throes. Nothing that W. S. Gilbert was about to invent with his Lord High Executioner in The Mikado, nothing in the behaviour of the raving Red Queen in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, was more fantastic than the scenes that occurred whenever Mutesa held a court, the only difference being that here these scenes were hideously and monstrously real. Torture by burning alive, the mutilation of victims by cutting off their hands, ears, and feet, the burial of living wives with their dead husbands — all these things were taken as a matter of course. This was more than a simple blood-lust: Mutesa crushed out life in the same way as a child will step on an insect, never for an instant thinking of the consequences, or experiencing a moment’s pity for the pain he was inflicting. He felt no pain, except his own. He, and all the people about him at his court, give the impression of playing at life, of living with an air of mad make-believe.

To be fair, it has to be recorded that it was not Mutesa himself who had invented these practices; all his ancestors (and there is known to have been a line of at least a score of kings behind him) behaved in exactly the same way, and a similar law of the jungle prevailed in all the minor tribal groups. Unless the ruler surrounded himself with an atmosphere of dread and superstitious awe he did not stay very long on his throne. Mutesa, on becoming king, had instantly put to death some sixty of his brothers by burning them alive, and this was apparently regarded as a perfectly normal precaution against rebellion.

Then too, he had other attributes besides this inherited bloodthirstiness. He was very far from being stupid: once he had seized power he had very quickly learned the arts of playing one man off against another by the careful bestowal of gifts. He knew all about the value of keeping his petitioners waiting, and he seems to have had some skill in making political appointments. One can easily see him as a sort of pantomime figure — the tribal king surrounded by his drums, his naked wives, and his black warriors — but in fact, as events were shortly to show, he was a great deal more than this. In this savage world he had the appearance and the manner of royalty, and an instinctive knowledge of politics. His foreign policy, for example, was handled with a certain crude dexterity: he left Rumanika alone in Karagwe and made war on Kamrasi in Bunyoro. It was of course not very serious war — this was still a world in which there were no firearms and still no Arab slavers to set one tribe against another — but it was a useful means of obtaining cattle and women, and Kamrasi, at least, was kept at bay.

This, then, was the strange little island of native civilization that had been left undisturbed to work out its own destiny in the heart of Central Africa a hundred years ago. It would naturally be absurd to suggest that there was any real enlightenment here; the three puppet kingdoms were still bound to a primeval way of life, and fear was the dominant factor in every man’s mind. On the other hand, these people were still insulated from the abuses of civilization: there was no syphilis or small-pox, no rinderpest to kill their cattle. Mutesa’s cruelties did not touch the general run of the people; they had plenty to eat and drink, and it seems not impossible that they believed themselves to be happy, or at any rate involved in an existence which was inevitable and eternal, and which they did not want to change. Only the barest echoes of other things reached them from the outside world — of the slavers coming up the Nile from Egypt and the Arab caravans from Zanzibar. Perhaps it really was a Garden of Eden of a kind, savage but fatalistic; at all events, it was still intact when Speke and his new companion, Grant, marched into Karagwe at the end of 1861, and with this the capsule was destined to burst at last.

The two explorers had taken over a year to get inland from Zanzibar, and most of the experiences of the previous expedition had been faithfully repeated; all their men save a few like Bombay and Mabruki had deserted, the local chieftains on the way had ferociously demanded their hongo, their goats and cattle had been stolen, and Grant had gone down with malaria. They had even failed as yet to catch a glimpse of Lake Victoria. Burton, who was now leading a separate expedition in the Cameroons on the other side of Africa, must have smiled had he heard the news. But now at last in November 1861 Speke and Grant extracted themselves from the local tribal wars to the north of Tabora and marched on into the terra incognita of Karagwe.

In Grant Speke had found an ideal companion. The two men were of the same age and had been friends in India, where they had often gone on shooting excursions together. But Grant had another quality: he was the perfect lieutenant. He must surely be rated as the most modest and self-effacing man who ever entered the turmoil of African exploration; he never puts himself forward, he never complains, never questions any order of his leader. Burton would have found him a paragon. Grant’s devotion, however, was entirely fixed upon Speke, and it was almost doglike in its completeness. ‘Not a shade of jealousy or distrust or even ill-temper,’ he says, ‘ever came between us.’ Speke he describes as ‘above every littleness’. General Gordon, whose judgements about people were often rash, thought that Grant himself was something of a bore,2 and just possibly he was a little dull as a conversationalist. Dullness seems to be the last thing we ever hear about well-known people in the past. Yet it would be foolish to regard Grant as a colourless nonentity. He was a cool and very steady man, a soldier and a sportsman well out of the ordinary, and in his own private and modest way he was a competent artist and a genuine amateur of botany. He had fought in a number of engagements that led up to the Mutiny in India, and had taken part in the relief of Lucknow where he had been awarded a medal and a clasp for gallantry.Rumanika was delighted to meet the two white men, the first he had ever seen. He shook hands warmly, addressed them in good Swahili, and established them in his best huts with an abundant supply of provisions. Speke had a pleasant month at Bweranyange. He exchanged presents with Rumanika, drank his pombe, and with a tape measure ascertained the dimensions of his fat wives. He did great execution among the rhinoceroses with his gun, and made notes about even more formidable animals which, he was told, inhabited the jungles farther to the west: ‘monsters who could not converse with men and never showed themselves unless they saw women pass by; then, in voluptuous excitement, they squeezed them to death’. If this was meant to be a description of a gorilla, one of the most timid and gentle of animals, it is not accurate. But then hardly any of the things they were seeing and hearing in this new land were very credible. Rumanika, for example, warned Speke that he must not proceed into Buganda until Mutesa sent for him, and that it would be impossible for him to appear at Mutesa’s court wearing his unmentionables (Speke in his account uses this Victorian word for trousers); he would have to obtain a gown. And so messengers were sent off to warn Mutesa of the expedition’s approach and while they waited the month of December slipped by.

Grant meanwhile was having a very bad time. He was assailed by a dreadful sore in his leg, and presently the infection became so agonizingly painful he was unable to stir from his hut. Certainly he was in no condition to walk or even to be carried when, on 8 January 1862, a troop of messengers arrived from Mutesa bearing with them an invitation for the expedition to proceed. It was therefore decided that he should remain behind in Rumanika’s care while Speke went forward alone. For the next three months Grant remained a prisoner in his hut, unable to go out, often in agony and without news of any kind.

It took Speke six weeks to walk to Mutesa’s court, and in the course of the journey he at last came within sight of Lake Victoria opposite the Sesse Islands. More than ever now he felt that his original conjecture had been correct: the lake was a vast inland sea and somewhere on its northern shore he would find its outlet to the north — the fountains of the Nile. For the moment, however, he was forced to put his geographical work aside and prepare himself for his reception by Mutesa.

He tells us that on his arrival he unpacked his best suit, dressed his men in red blankets, and with a handsome collection of gifts got ready to present himself at the palace. But rain fell and in the best manner of royal garden parties the reception was put off until the following day. On 20 February 1862 he set forth again flanked by his red-blanketed bodyguard, with the Union Jack leading the way, only to find himself out-faced by a rival delegation which was given precedence; Speke was told to wait in the hot sun outside the palace. He stood it for five minutes and then in a fury turned round and walked back to his own hut a mile away. The courtiers who were conducting him to the King watched his retirement with consternation — evidently such a thing had never happened before — and presently they came running to say that it was all a mistake; the King would see him at once and he would be allowed to bring his own chair to sit on, an unheard-of privilege.

When Speke got back to the palace all was ready for his reception. A band playing five-stringed harps and trumpets ushered him through the outer courts where small pages were rushing around gathering their cloaks about them so as not to show their legs; and finally he came into the presence of the monarch himself. Speke set up his chair in front of the throne, erected his umbrella and waited events. Nothing happened. For an hour the two men sat gazing at one another, Mutesa occasionally turning to his courtiers to pass a remark on the umbrella, on the bodyguard, or on Speke himself. From time to time a draught of beer was handed to him. Speke simply sat and waited.

At length a man approached with a message: had he seen the King?

‘Yes,’ Speke answered, ‘for full one hour.’

When this was translated to Mutesa he rose and walked away into the interior of his palace on the tips of his toes in his imitation of a lion. There now ensued a long wait while the King ate his dinner: as an act of courtesy, it was explained to Speke, Mutesa had refrained from eating until the meeting had taken place. Finally, at the end of the day, when they met again by the light of torches, Speke offered his presents; several rifles and guns together with ammunition, a gold watch, a telescope, an iron chair, beads, silk cloths and knives, spoons and forks. Mutesa in return sent him a gift of cattle, goats, fish, fowls, porcupines, and rats, all of which apparently were regarded as suitable items of diet.

It was at a further interview that the notorious shooting incident took place. Speke was invited to display the magic of his pistols by taking a pot-shot at four cows, a feat he accomplished a little awkwardly: one of the cows, charging upon him, required a second bullet before it was dispatched.

The king [Speke says] now loaded one of the carbines I had given him with his own hands, and giving it full-cock to a page told him to go out and shoot a man in the outer court: which was no sooner accomplished than the little urchin returned to announce his success, with a look of glee such as one would see in the face of a boy who had robbed a bird’s nest, caught a trout, or done any other boyish trick. The king said to him, ‘And did you do it well?’ ‘Oh yes, capitally.’ He spoke the truth, no doubt, for he dared not have trifled with the king: but the affair created hardly any interest. I never heard, and there appeared no curiosity to know, what individual human being the urchin had deprived of life.

Nothing would keep Mutesa away from his new toys after this. On fine days he would march round his capital, gun in hand, his wives, pages, and courtiers following behind and the band playing; and if by luck he managed to hit a vulture on a tree he would be thunderstruck by his own magical powers, and would run forward to the fallen victim crying out ‘woh, woh, woh’ in infantile excitement. The court, grovelling and ‘n’yanizgging’, would fall upon the ground around him.

The women who followed Mutesa about in hordes wherever he went appeared to occupy a privileged position, but it was slavery none the less. ‘Young virgins . . .’ Speke wrote, ‘stark naked, and smeared with grease, but holding for decency’s sake a small square of mbugu (bark cloth) at the upper comers in both hands before them, are presented by their fathers in propitiation for some offence and to fill the harem.’ From time to time one of these girls would be sent to Speke as a gift, and he parcelled them out as wives among his followers.

The Queen-Mother, however, whom Speke describes as ‘fair, fat and forty-five’, was a figure of some power in the state and kept her separate court at a little distance from Mutesa’s palace. She was not often sober. Drinking, smoking, and dancing to the music of her personal band were the usual occupations of the Queen-Mother’s hut, and it was not surprising that she complained to Speke that she was suffering from bad dreams and illness of the stomach. He dosed her from his medicine chest and advised her to give up drinking. But she was not a good patient. Returning to her hut one day Speke found himself involved in an orgy which ended in the Queen-Mother and her attendants drinking like swine on all fours from a trough of beer.

After Speke had been for three months in the bizarre surroundings Grant finally arrived. He was still limping from the effects of the sore in his leg but otherwise restored to health, and now both men were eager to push on towards their goal. On their separate journeys from Karagwe they had crossed a considerable river, the Kagera, but since it flowed into Lake Victoria and not out of it they dismissed it as a possible source of the Nile. At Mutesa’s court, however, they heard very definite reports of another stream that emerged from the lake only a short distance to the east. The lake was said to pour itself out in a wide fall of water towards the north. Speke, who had never been permitted to leave Mutesa’s capital in all his three months’ stay, was now determined to make his way to this spot and then follow the river downstream wherever it might lead.

Mutesa was much opposed to their going. It amused him to have the two white men at his court and he was not altogether sure that he had extracted every possible gift from them. Then, too, they were bound to enter the territory of Kamrasi, the King of Bunyoro, when they went away, and with Kamrasi he was at war. For another six weeks he prevaricated and delayed, and then at last on 7 July 1862 he let them go. The two explorers with Bombay and their caravan and a Buganda bodyguard marched out to the east. They were on the eve of the climax of their tremendous journey.

And now occurred one of the strangest incidents of the whole adventure. Their guide had led them somewhat north of the lake, and in order to reach the Nile and trace it to its source it was necessary for the caravan to turn sharply south. A conference was held, and as a result it was decided that the expedition should split once more: Speke alone was to go to the source while Grant turned north and opened up the way to Kamrasi’s court in Bunyoro. One can only take the two men’s word for it that they were entirely agreed upon this arrangement. From Grant we have no hint of reproach or disappointment. He had staked his life on getting to this goal, and now at the last minute, when it was within his reach, he quietly turned away from it in order to please his companion. Grant merely says that he was invited by Speke to make a flying march to the source and was forced to decline since his bad leg made it quite impossible to manage twenty miles a day. In any case, he goes on, this was not a great issue; they had seen the lake and they knew that the Nile issued from it. Just why it was necessary for Speke to dash off at the rate of twenty miles a day is not explained; but then there is so much between these two that cannot be understood unless one constantly remembers Grant’s utter devotion to his leader. As with a marriage, a veil falls down between this partnership and the outside world, and no one can presume to know the intricacies of their relationship. Behaviour that might seem to us to be unfair and heartless is to them, apparently, perfectly natural. Speke, of course, was a man with an idée fixe; his whole being was centred upon proving that his theory of the Nile was the right one, and no doubt he was now in a state of intense impatience to get to his objective. To have hung about waiting for Grant to keep up with him — and this at a time when some accident or mischance could still wreck the expedition — was intolerable. Grant presumably felt this strongly, and with an almost feminine resignation gave way; better to stand in the reflection of Speke’s glory than to strain their friendship too much.

At all events, Speke went off with his flying column and reached the Nile on 21 July 1862 at a place called Urondogani about forty miles downstream from the lake: ‘Here at last I stood on the brink of the Nile; most beautiful was the scene, nothing could surpass it! It was the very perfection of the kind of effect aimed at in a highly developed park: with a magnificent stream, 600 to 700 yards wide, dotted with islets and rocks. . . .’ The crocodiles, the high grassy banks, the hippopotamuses, the herds of hartebeest — it was everything they had imagined, and Speke in his exaltation told his men that ‘they ought to shave their heads and bathe in the holy river, the cradle of Moses. . . .’ Bombay soberly replied that, being Mohammedans, ‘we don’t look on these things in the same fanciful manner as you do: we are contented with the commonplaces of life. . . .’

They were keen enough, however, when they marched upstream and came within sight of their goal at last on 28 July; all forgot their fatigue and rushed forward along the river bank. A hill blocked their view of the lake but there, at their feet, the great stream poured itself like a breaking tidal wave over a waterfall. ‘It was a sight that attracted one for hours,’ Speke says, ‘ — the roar of the waters, the thousands of passenger-fish leaping at the falls with all their might; the Wasoga and Waganda fishermen coming out in boats and taking post on all the rocks with rod and hook, hippopotami and crocodiles lying sleepily on the water. . . .’

He named the place the Ripon Falls ‘after the nobleman who presided over the Royal Geographical Society when my expedition was got up’.

It now remained for the explorers to keep themselves alive until they could get back to civilization to tell the story, and there was still no guarantee whatever that they would succeed. (...)

THE WHITE NILE

Alan Moorehead