From Albertville, Baudouinville, and other stations on its western shore a flotilla of small vessels and several steam-yachts now navigate this lake, and to these other and larger craft will soon be added. A telegraph and telephone line, connecting Kassongo on the Lualaba with Baraka on Lake Tanganyika, was opened in the latter part of 1903. This line will soon be extended to Lake Kivu.
The region around Tanganyika is noted for its beautiful scenery, and a large part of it is said to be unusually healthful. Like Kivu, this lake is situated in an immense plateau, six thousand feet above the sea. The angular inclination and general configuration of all these lakes in the eastern part of the Congo is, in fact, very similar; each lake, however, has its individual scenery, climate, and peculiar flora. Moore found Tanganyika floored with the shells of millions of molluscs, the zoölogical remains of a dead sea. He discovered here also three kinds of sponges. On the eastern shores abound huge swamps and immense tracts of mimosa. The dark red cliffs on the West Coast form a brilliant contrast to the blue African sky and the white clouds. Between Tanganyika and Nyangwe, the old slave-capital of Tippo Tip, the country is tenanted by the Manyema, famous as collectors of ivory. Surveys are now being made for a railway from Beni to Tanganyika. This it is proposed to continue to Stanleyville on the Middle Congo.
Lake Moero, one hundred miles south-west of Tanganyika and the south-eastern boundary between British territory and the State, was discovered by Livingstone. It was first explored, however, by the Belgian officers, Bia and Francqui. This lake, which is one hundred miles long and about half as broad, is now patrolled by a steam-yacht.
Looking Backward.
Only a few years ago the immense basin of the Congo was an untamed wilderness, “a slave-park” Stanley called it, bare to raids of murderous marauders. Bands of predatory Arabs swooping down upon the defenceless natives decimated whole tribes, and carried away men, women, and children by the thousand. The slave-trader stalked like a pestilence through the land, leaving in his wake the smoking ruins of a hundred villages and the charred skeletons of his black victims.
It was not only the natives who suffered from the raids of merciless ravagers; but the Europeans, explorer, merchant, and missionary, were also subject to their tyrannical impositions. And when, as in the case of Emin Pasha, they opposed the designs of these despoilers, they were ruthlessly murdered. Flame and sword, robbery and massacre,—such, until ten years ago, were the chief episodes in the epic of the Congo.
To-day this vast region is not only geographically determined, occupied, and effectually protected, but the power of the Arab raider has been for ever annihilated. Regions which for ages were the scene of carnage and holocaust have now been pacified. Where all was insecurity and turbulence a reign of law and order has been substituted.
Nature has here been so prodigal of her gifts that her very extravagance renders in some respects the task of colonisation less easy. Before roads could be built it was necessary to hew down huge forests; before stations could be established it was needful to explore and to conquer the wilderness. The paths that plunged into the jungle ended in trackless solitudes. The vastnesses bristled with unknown terrors. There was call for the explorer and the pioneer, but it seemed as if ages must elapse before there was need of the carriers of commerce.
To conduct broad highways from the coast to the centre, through a territory so vast in extent, so dangerous, and so impenetrable, would seem indeed a task for centuries. Such, too, it is safe to assume, would still be the situation had it not been for the magnificent water-system of the region and the great colonising genius who turned its natural destiny to the civilising course of an onward industry. Without these splendid flowing highways of commerce, pulsing from the heart of the continent to the sea, the wonderful progress of the last quarter of a century would not have been possible. Following the lead of the Congo and its tributaries, Belgian pioneers have moved through the great wilderness, planting the plough and the cross, until to-day Central Africa, so long curtained from the eyes of civilised man, lies bare to the world.
It was by this instrument that the siege of the great unknown was prosecuted. It was thus that that citadel of despair, the stronghold of Darkest Africa, was subjugated. And as we look at the magnificent results, and at the still more magnificent future which those results foreshadow, we cannot but conclude that this natural aid to the efforts of a heroic band of explorers was more than the mere manifestation of blind chance.