In Darkest Africa, Vol. 2; or, The Quest, Rescue, and Retreat of Emin, Governor of Equatoria

by Henry M. Stanley

Critics are in the habit of omitting almost all mention of maps when attached to books of travel. This is not quite fair. Mine have cost me more labour than the note-taking, literary work, sketching, and photographing combined. In the aggregate, the winding of the three chronometers daily for nearly three years, the 300 sets of observations, the calculation of all these observations, the mapping of the positions, tracing of rivers, and shading of mountain ranges, the number of compassbearings taken, the boiling of the thermometers, the records of the varying of the aneroids, the computing of heights, and the notes of temperature, all of which are necessary for a good map, have cost me no less than 780 hours of honest work, which, say at six hours per day, would make 130 working days. If there were no maps accompanying books of this kind it would scarcely be possible to comprehend what was described, and the narrative would become intolerably dry. I relegate the dryness to the maps, by which I am relieved from tedious description, at the same time that they minister to my desire of being clear, and are beautiful, necessary, and interesting features of the book; and I am firmly convinced that with a glance at the profile map of Ruwenzori, the Semliki Valley, and Lakes Albert Edward and Albert, the reader will know more of the grand physical features of this region than he knew of the surroundings of Lake Michigan.

As we descend from Karimi to the basin of the Albert Edward the first thing we become conscious of is that we are treading the dry bed of a lake. We do not require a gifted geologist to tell us that. Five feet of rise to the lake would increase its extent five miles to the north and five miles to the south. Fifty feet of rise would restore the lake to its old time-honoured condition, when its waves rolled over the pebbled beach under the shadows of the forest near Mtsora. We find that we really needed to pay this visit to the shores of the Albert Edward to thoroughly understand the physical changes which have, within the last few hundred years, diminished the former spacious lake to its present circumscribed limits. We should be liable to censure and severe criticism if we attempted to fix a hard and fast date to the period when Lake Albert extended to the forest of Awamba from the north, and Lake Albert Edward extended from the south over the plain of Makara to the southern edge of the forest. But it does not need a clever mathematician to calculate the number of years which have elapsed since the Semliki channeled its bed deep enough to drain the Makara plain. It is easily computable. The nitrous, saline, and acrid properties deposited over the plain by the receding lake have not been thoroughly scoured out yet. The grass is nutritious enough for the hardy cattle, the dark euphorbia, the acacia, and thorn-bush find along the edges of the plain a little thin humus of decayed grass; but nine-tenths of it is grassy plain, and the tropic forest of Awamba cannot advance its borders. The case is the same on the southern plain of the Albert. We find there a stretch of plain twenty miles long devoted to poor grass, fatal to cattle; then we find eight miles crossed with a thin forest of parachute acacias, with here and there an euphorbia, and then we are in the old, old forest.

At every leisure hour my mind reverted to the lessons which I was acquiring in this wonderful region. Time was when Ruwenzori did not exist. It was grassy upland, extending from Unyoro to the Balegga plateau. Then came the upheaval at a remote period; Ruwenzori was raised to the clouds, and a yawning abyss 250 miles long and thirty miles broad lay S.W. and N.E. The tropic rains fell for ages; they filled the abyss to overflowing with water, and in time it found an outlet through what is known under the modern name of Equatoria. The outflowing water washed the earth away along its course, down to the bed-rock, and for countless ages, through every second of time, it has been scouring it away, atom by atom, to form Lower Egypt and fill the Mediterranean, and in the meantime the bottom of the abyss has been silting up with the sediment and débris of Ruwenzori, with the remains of uncountable generations of fish, with unnumbered centuries of dead vegetation, until now, with the wearing away of the dykes of rock and reefs in the course of the White Nile, two lakes have been formed; and other dykes of rock appeared between the lakes, first as clusters of islets, then covered with grass; finally, they caught the soil brought down by glaciers, moraines have connected rock to rock, and have formed a valley marvellous in its growth of tropic forest, and on each side of this forest there are plains undergoing the slow process of crystalline transformation, and on their lake borders you see yet an intermediate stage in the daily increasing mud, and animal and vegetable life add to the height of it, and presently it will be firm dry ground. Now dip a punting-pole into the shallows at the south end of Lake Albert, and the pole drops into five feet of ooze. It is the sediment borne down from the slopes of Ruwenzori by the tributaries into the Semliki, and thence by the Semliki into the still waters of the lake. And if we sound the depths of Lake Albert Edward, the pole drops through four or five feet of grey mud, to which are attached thousands of mica flakes and comminuted scales and pulverized bones of fish, which emit an overpowering stench. And atom by atom the bed-rock between the forest of Awamba and the Lake Albert Edward is being eroded and scoured away, until, by-and-by, the lake will have become dry land, and through the centre of it will meander the Semliki, having gathered the tributaries from Ruwenzori, the Ankori, and Ruanda uplands, to itself; and in the course of time, when the nitrous and acrid properties have been well scoured off the plain, and the humus has thickened, the forest of Awamba will advance by degrees, and its trees will exude oil and gum, and bear goodly fruit for the uses of man. That is, in brief, what we learn by observation from the Semliki Valley and the basin of the twin lakes, and what will be confirmed during our journey over the tracts of lake-bed between Rusessé and Unyampaka.

1889.
June 16.
Rusessé.

Between Rusessé and Katwé is an extensive plain, dipping down in a succession of low terraces to the Nyama-gazani River, and covered with pasture grass. This terraced plain is remarkable for its growth of euphorbia, which have been planted by generations of Wasongora to form zeribas to protect their herds from beasts of prey and for defence against the archers and spearmen of predatory tribes, and which thickly dot the plains everywhere. Many of these euphorbia, that stood in circles round the clustered huts, were venerable patriarchs, quite five centuries old; hence we assume that the Wasongora have been established in this region for a long time, and that they formed a powerful nation until the Waganda and Wanyoro, furnished with guns and rifles by Arabs, came sweeping through the land on their periodic raids. Readers of ‘Through the Dark Continent’ will remember the story of the Katekiro’s raid, that must have occurred about eighteen years ago, and of the reported marvels said to have been met by the host, as they travelled through a great plain where there were geysers spouting mud, hot springs, intolerable thirst, immense loss of life, ruthless conflicts between the native tribe and the Waganda, and bad water that killed hundreds. We are now on the land which witnessed the raid of the Waganda, and which then despoiled of its splendid herds of cattle. Since that time Kabba Rega, with the aid of his musket-armed Wara-Sura, has occupied the land, usurped the government of the country, and has possessed himself of every cow. Captain Casati has informed me that he once witnessed the return of the raiders from Wasongora, and saw the many thousands of cattle which they had taken.

The wide expanses of flats, white with efflorescing natron, teeming with hot springs and muddy geysers, turned out to be pure exaggerations of an imaginative boy, and nothing of all the horrors expected have we seen except perhaps a dreary monotony of level and uniformity of surface features, grass fallen into the sere through drought, and tufts of rigid euphorbia, so characteristic of poor soil. The silence of the plain is due to the wholesale expatriation of the tribe; thirst, because, as we near the Lake borders, the tributaries lie far apart; sickness, from the habit of people drinking the stagnant liquid found in pits.

The grass of the plain grieved us sorely while travelling through it. The stalks grew to the height of three feet, and its spikelets pierced through the thickest clothing, and clung to every garment as we passed by, and became very irritating and troublesome.

The two best views obtained of Ruwenzori have been those obtained from Karimi, up a long, narrow valley, and from the plain near the Nyama-gazani River. The last was the farewell view, the great mountain having suddenly cast its cloudy garments aside to gratify us once more. In rank above rank the mountainous ridges rose until they culminated in Ruwenzori. From the south it looks like a range of about thirty miles in length, with as many blunt-topped peaks, separated from each other by deep hollows. Up to this time we had estimated the height as about 17,000 feet, but the revelation of the southern face, shrouded with far-descending fields of deep and pure snow, exalted it 1,500 feet higher in the general opinion. I seized this opportunity to photograph the scene, that other eyes might view the most characteristic image of Ruwenzori. Here and there may be seen, as in the pencil sketches, the dark patches, showing the more precipitous portions of the slopes, which are too steep for the accumulation of snow. The greater exhibition of snow on the southern face is due to the lesser height of the intervening ridges, which on the north side shut out from view the snowy range.