We proceeded this afternoon at two o’clock with sails in a south-easterly direction, and halted for the sake of antelope-hunting at three o’clock, at the right shore, E.S.E., before the curve to the right. Four o’clock: we sail to S.S.E., then a bend to the left, S.E. by E., where we stop again to hunt and also to remain. An antelope-herd of about sixty head was standing shortly before at a little distance on the shore, like a flock of goats, in harmless innocence and anticipating nothing evil. Wild buffaloes, lions, and hyænas were seen by several of our men: where are the holes and corners in which these beasts lurk? there must be mountains. Thermometer, sunrise, 15°; noon, 26°, 27°; from four to five o’clock, 28°; sunset 26½°.
21st March.—We sail from our place at half-past six o’clock, quite quietly, without a drum being beat, and go E.S.E., with a cold north-east wind. Half-past seven.—From E. Libàhn: again to the left, E.S.E.; eight o’clock: and then again to the left at nine, N.N.E., where we stop at the left shore for sport, pretending that it is owing to the contrary winds.—Oh you Turks!
M. Arnaud now pays himself in skins, which he demands very freely for “son Altesse,” but which he intends to sell in France at 500 francs the head. Eleven o’clock: we go with libàhn round a corner, and come to N., whence the river winds again slowly to the right, N.E. by N. and to E., where we are driven forward and indeed without sails. I remark here that the lower border of the river is rocky, with a layer of soft stone under the clay, from which it may originate, and appearing to be limestone formation, until we break off the deceitful exterior, and the apparent corrosion by the action of the atmosphere turns out to be alluvial deposit,—the clay, however, remaining sticking to the hands like sand. One o’clock: E.N.E. All the vessels bear up! Four o’clock: three reïs had been sent forward with the sandàl to sound the water, and the men were honourable enough to express their conviction that there was still a watercourse: we shall get now regularly fixed upon every sand-bank. I, for my part, would like to make yet a good way, for I may stumble perhaps upon a firmer foundation of stone or something else new. We proceed, therefore, further,—against Mohammed Ali’s will, and certainly against Ahmed Basha’s, who may be very much in want of vessels and men at this moment, without any invasion on the part of England or France. E. by N., and we squat again. A quarter before five o’clock: S.E. by E. Water is on the right, but we cannot get there because the bed of the river is elevated in the middle, and these banks are magnificently larded with the spiry Conchylia, which would deprive the vessels instantaneously of their beautiful caulking. The reïs are sent out again in the sandàl; everyone is in doubt what is to be done. Suliman Kashef and Selim Capitan want to return. An island lies in view above. I should like to be there to make observations, but that cannot be. Thermometer, 17°, 28° to 30°, 27°.
22nd March.—Suliman Kashef sails back for the sake of the chase; two other vessels follow: obedience seems renounced. I go to the island and shoot two antelopes, dark as it was. No artifice, such as I have already related, was necessary in this neighbourhood.
23rd March.—We set out indeed at seven o’clock in the morning for the return voyage, but stop soon again, notwithstanding the favourable wind at the right shore, because deer are seen close to it. The Sobàt and the Blue river might be conduits for the high land, like the Tigris and Euphrates, Indus and Ganges were for the valley-land, made subsequently fit for the nourishment of nations. Tradition and history up to our time, teach us that Nature was not powerful enough, and perhaps did not wish it, to form everlasting barriers between nations, whether seas, rivers, or mountains; for the destination of man is perfectability, which can only be attained by mutual commercial intercourse.
Was Africa, therefore, although in the same latitude as other countries,—for example, Arabia,—exclusively created for the black species, who, so far as I have had experience of them, will never leave the low grade of intelligence in which they have been for so long a time, until they come into a closer and more continuous association with whites? Anthropophagy, indeed, makes the Nile the partition-wall between Asia and Africa, instead of the Isthmus of Suez and the Red Sea. Our Sobàt (as also perhaps the White river, unless the black people from below ascended here after the drying up of that part assumed by me to have been a lake, which may be almost taken for granted if we consider the affinity of languages from the Dinka country to Bari,) drew down probably only a black race,—a younger stem, I conjecture, than that of Caucasus,—between which and the nations of the Nile there is a total difference in colour and manners.
Habesh, like a second Cashmere, might be the cradle of white men; no less than Arabia, lying opposite, which has nourished perhaps the same species, but burnt by the sun;—and if a black race shot up here instead of the white, the rivers of High Asia that disembogue on this side were large enough to import white people. The Red Sea and the Persian Gulf must, indeed, at the very earliest time, have formed nearly insurmountable obstacles, if antediluvian shipbuilding, even without Noah’s ark, had not brought about cultivation, and caused the necessity of exertion and the desire of emigration; and who will answer for it that the Red Sea was not at one time a Tempe, so that an excursion to Africa might have been made under the shade of rose and orange trees? The divulsed coasts, the washed-away sharp rocks of the dangerous shallows, and the submarine mountains, might easily indicate that there was once a small irruption.
Habesh might have been the real mother country of Nubia and Egypt, by means of the fecundation brought from Asia. Nuba negroes mixed with the whites, and became masters of the country, until they were forced back to their mountains in Kordofàn,—still remaining a pure race, and nothing being left of the whole Egyptian policy but circumcision. The black nation on the Nile might have been separated from that in Habesh by a cordon; and both of these tribes preferred, on cultivation increasing, a comfortable life in the city to the free one in the mountains, until the Romans connected again Habesh and Egypt, and built Axum.
The shores of the Sobàt have hitherto been without wood; but I saw, upon the shore behind the island just left by us, a row of trees, said to be Döbkers, and probably were so; for I recognised the little solitary shrubs, in which I and my servants had groped about till late at night, to be young shoots of Döbkers, which seem to have sprung up this year at high-water; and also nebek and telle. I found water-thistles on the shore above in unusual abundance, and collected also that clay which appeared to me previously to be a layer of stone. It was not quite free from fine sand, which the water had washed on the shore, and exhibited, therefore, a rough, stone surface, without being so yet. But where it lay piecemeal about the shore it was as hard and black as stone saturated with water, and dried or burnt by the sun, for that luminary has the power, with the assistance of rain, of vitrifying rocks; and we have seen ourselves such greenish ridges and blocks in the Nubian deserts.
According to Girard, the specimens I brought from the shores of the Sobàt consist of a micaceous sand, dark-brown, ochrous clay, chalky sand, and partly of a conglomerate composed of small fragments of limestone baked together by the sun. The sand, where it is pure, consists of several little yellowish grains of quartz, a small portion of reddish feldspar, some brown iron-stone, little brown tombac-mica, and a black mineral consisting of small grains, the nature of which could not be exactly ascertained. These materials indicate that the origin of the sand is derived from a mica-slate and gneiss mountain not far distant; for if the sand were far from the mountain whence it originated, it would not contain coloured mica.