After all these great efforts, the learned of antiquity began to look upon the discovery as desperate, and not to be attained, for which reason both poets and historians speak of it in a strain of despondency:—

Secreto de fonte cadens; qui semper inani
Quaerendus ratione latet, nec contigit ulli,
Hoc vidisse caput, fertur sine teste creatus.
Claudian.

And Pliny, as late as the time of Trajan, says, that these fountains were in his time utterly unknown—Nilus incertis ortus fontibus, it per deserta et ardentia, et immenso longitudinis spatio ambulans[127],—nor was there any other attempt made later by the ancients.

From this it is obvious, that none of the ancients ever made this discovery of the source of the Nile. They gave it up entirely, and caput Nili quaerere became a proverb, marking the difficulty, or rather the impossibility, of any undertaking. Let us now examine the pretensions of the moderns.

The first in latter days who visited Abyssinia was a monk, and at the same time a merchant; he was sent by Nonnosus, ambassador of the emperor Justin, in the fifth year of the reign of that prince, that is A. D. 522. He is called Cosmas the hermit, as also Indoplaustes. Many have thought that this name was given him from his having travelled much in India, properly so called; but we have no evidence that Cosmas was ever in the Asiatic India, and I rather imagine he obtained his name from his travels in Abyssinia, called by the ancients India; he went as far as Axum, and seems to have paid proper attention to the difference of climates, names, and situations of places, but he arrived not at the Nile, nor did he attempt it. The province of the Agows was probably at that time inaccessible, as the court was then in Tigré at Axum, a considerable distance beyond the Tacazzé, and is to the eastward of it.

None of the Portuguese who first arrived in Abyssinia, neither Covillan, Roderigo de Lima, Christopher de Gama, nor the patriarch Alphonso Mendes, ever saw, or indeed pretended to have seen, the source of the Nile. At last, in the reign of Za Denghel, came Peter Paez, who laid claim to this honour; how far his pretensions are just I am now going to consider.—Paez has left a history of the mission, and some remarkable occurrences that happened in that country, in two thick volumes octavo, closely written in a plain stile; copies of this work were circulated through every college and seminary of Jesuits that existed in his time, and which have been everywhere found in their libraries since the disgrace of that learned body.

Athanasius Kircher, a Jesuit, well known for his extensive learning and voluminous writings, and still more for the rashness with which he advances the most improbable facts in natural history, is the man that first published an account of the fountains of the Nile, and, as he says, from this journal left by Peter Paez.

I must, however, here observe, that no relation of this kind was to be found in three copies of Peter Paez’s history, to which I had access when in Italy, on my return home. One of these copies I saw at Milan, and, by the interest of friends, had an opportunity of perusing it at my leisure. The other two were at Bologna and Rome. I ran through them rapidly, attending only to the place where the description ought to have been, and where I did not find it; but having copied the first and last page of the Milan manuscript, and comparing them with these two last mentioned, I found that all the three were, word for word, the same, and none of them contained one syllable of the discovery of the source.

However this be, I do not think it is right for me to pronounce thus much, unless I bring collateral proofs to strengthen my opinion, and to shew that no such excursion was ever pretended to have been made by that missionary, in any of his works, unless that which passed through the hand of Kircher.

Alphonso Mendes came into Abyssinia about a year after Paez’s death. New and desireable as that discovery must have been to himself, to the pope, king of Spain, and all his great patrons in Portugal and Italy, though he wrote the history of the country, and of the particulars concerning the mission in great detail, and with good judgment, yet he never mentions this journey of Peter Paez, though it probably must have been conveyed to Rome and Portugal, after his inspection, and under his authority.