“When we entered Ruhinga’s territory of Mugihewah, we found ourselves about 300 yards from the river about which a great deal has been said and written. At Unyanyembe I was told that the Rusizi was an affluent. At Ujiji all Arabs but one united in saying the same thing, and within ten miles of the Rusizi a freedman of Zanzibar swore it was an affluent.
“On the morning of the eleventh day of our departure from Ujiji, we were rowed towards the river. We came to a long, narrow bay, fringed on all sides with tall, dense reeds and swarming with crocodiles and soon came to the mouth of the Rusizi. As soon as we had entered the river all doubt vanished before the strong, turbid flood against which we had to contend in the ascent. After about ten minutes we entered what seemed a lagoon, but which was the result of a late inundation. About an hour higher up the river began to be confined to its proper banks, and is about thirty yards broad, but very shallow.
“Two days higher up, Ruhinga told us, the Rusizi was joined by the Loanda, coming from the northwest. There could be no mistake then. Dr. Livingstone and myself had ascended it, had felt the force of the strong inflowing current—the Rusizi was an influent, as much so as the Malagarazi, the Linche, and Rugufu, but with its banks full it can only be considered as ranking third among the rivers flowing into the Tanganyika. Though rapid it is extremely shallow; it has three mouths, up which an ordinary ship’s boat loaded might in vain attempt to ascend. Burton and Speke, though they ascended to within six hours’ journey by canoe from the Rusizi, were compelled to turn back by the cowardice of the boatmen. Had they ascended to Meuta’s capital, they could easily have seen the head of the lake. Usige is but a district of Wumdi, governed by several small chiefs, who owe obedience to Mwezi, the great King of Wumdi.
“We spent nine days at the head of the Tanganyika exploring the islands and many bays that indent its shores.
“In returning to Ujiji we coasted along the west side of the Tanganyika, as far as the country of the Wasansi, whom we had to leave on no amicable terms owing to their hostility to Arabs, and arrived at Ujiji on the 18th of December, having been absent twenty-eight days.
“Though the Rusizi River can no longer be a subject of curiosity to geographers—and we are certain that there is no connection between the Tanganyika and Baker’s Lake, or the Albert N’yanza—it is not yet certain that there is no connection between the Tanganyika and the Nile River. The western coast has not all been explored; and there is reason to suppose that a river runs out of the Tanganyika through the deep caverns of Kabogo Mountain, far under ground and out on the western side of Kabogo into the Lualaba, or the Nile. Livingstone has seen the river about forty miles or so west of Kabogo (about forty yards broad at that place), but he does not know that it runs out of the mountain.
RECEPTION OF THE CHIEF RUHINGI.
“This is one of the many things which he has yet to examine.”
It thus appearing that the Rusizi is an affluent, not an effluent, of Tanganyika Lake, the expedition failed to sustain the explorer’s hypothesis, but added a useful item of geographical knowledge to the then existing stock. Nor does it follow that because the Rusizi flows into the Tanganyika, there is no river flowing out of it into that system of lakes which had before been discovered by the explorer, and of which the Chambesi—almost a system of rivers itself—is the largest affluent yet discovered. Should Dr. Livingstone’s hypothesis of an effluent from the west shore of Tanganyika Lake not be sustained, and its waters found to procure outlet by Lake Nyassa and the Zambesi, his future discoveries will in all probability show a similar formation of the continent in east central Africa to that which he discovered to be the fact when he explored Lake Dilolo in the land of the Balonda.