Balthazar Tellez, a learned Jesuit, has wrote two volumes in folio with great candour and impartiality, considering the spirit of those times; and he declares his work to be compiled from this history of Alphonso Mendes the patriarch, from the two volumes of Peter Paez, as well as from the regular reports made by the individuals of the company in some places, and by the provincial letters in others; to all which he had compleat access, as also to the annual reports of Peter Paez among the rest, from 1598 to 1622; yet Tellez makes no mention of such a discovery, though he is very particular as to the merit of each missionary during the long reign of Sultan Segued, or Socinios, which occupies more than half of the two volumes.
After these strong presumptions, that Peter Paez neither made such a journey nor ever pretended it, I shall submit the account that Paez himself, or Kircher for him, has given of the expedition and consequent discovery; and if any of my readers can persuade themselves that a man of genius, such as was Peter Paez, transported by accident to these fountains, and exulting as he does upon the discovery, the value of which he seems to have known well, could yet have given such a description as he does, I am then contented with being only the partner of Peter Paez.
Before I state the account of his observations in his own, or in Kircher’s words, I have one observation to make regarding the dates and time of the journey. That memorable day which has been fixed upon for the discovery, is the 21st of April 1618. The rains are then begun, and on that account the season being very unwholesome, armies, without extreme necessity, are rarely in the field; between September and February at farthest is the time the Abyssinian army is abroad from the capital, and in action.
There are two nations of Agows in Abyssinia, the one near the fountains of the Nile, called the Agows of Damot; the other near the head of the Tacazzé, in the province of Lasta, called the Tcheratz Agows. Now, we see from the annals of Socinios’s reign, that he had several campaigns against the Agows. The first was in the fourth year of his reign, in the year 1608; his annals say it was against the Tcheratz Agow. His second campaign was in the seventh year of his reign, or 1611; that, too, was against the Agows of Lasta; so that if Peter Paez was with the emperor in either of these campaigns, he could not have seen the head of any river but that of the Tacazzé. The third campaign was in 1625, against Sacala, Geesh, and Ashoa, when the Galla made an inroad into Gojam, but retired upon the royal army’s marching against them, and crossed the Nile into their own country. Socinios upon this had advanced against the Agows of Damot, then in rebellion also, and had fought with Sacala, Ashoa, and Geesh likewise, the clan immediately contiguous to the sources. Now this was surely the time when Peter Paez, or any attendant on the emperor, might have seen the fountains of the Nile in safety, as the king’s army, in whole or in part, must have been encamped near, or perhaps upon, the very sources themselves; a place, of all other, suited for such a purpose; but this was in the year 1625, and Peter Paez died in the year 1622.
I shall now state, in Kircher’s own words, translated into English, the description he has given, as from Paez, of the sources which he saw; and I will fairly submit, to any reader of judgment, whether this is a description he ought to be content with from an eye-witness, whether it may not suit the sources of any other river as well as those of the Nile, or whether in itself it is distinct enough to leave one clear idea behind it.
“The river[128], at this day, by the Ethiopians is called the Abaoy; it rises in the kingdom of Gojam, in a territory called Sabala, whose inhabitants are called Agows. The source of the Nile is situated in the west part of Gojam, in the highest part of a valley, which resembles a great plain on every side, surrounded by high mountains. On the 21st of April, in the year 1618, being here, together with the king and his army, I ascended the place, and observed every thing with great attention; I discovered first two round fountains, each about four palms in diameter, and saw, with the greatest delight, what neither Cyrus[129] king of the Persians, nor Cambyses, nor Alexander the Great, nor the famous Julius Cæsar, could ever discover. The two openings of these fountains have no issue in the plain on the top of the mountain, but flow from the root of it. The second fountain lies about a stone-cast west from the first: the inhabitants say that this whole mountain is full of water, and add, that the whole plain about the fountain is floating and unsteady, a certain mark that there is water concealed under it; for which reason, the water does not overflow at the fountain, but forces itself with great violence out at the foot of the mountain. The inhabitants, together with the emperor, who was then present with his army, maintain that that year it trembled little on account of the drought, but other years, that it trembled and overflowed so as that it could scarce be approached without danger. The breadth of the circumference may be about the cast of a sling: below the top of this mountain the people live about a league distant from the fountain to the west; and this place is called Geesh, and the fountain seems to be a cannon-shot distant from Geesh; moreover, the field where the fountain is, is upon all sides difficult of access, except on the north side, where it may be ascended with ease.”
I shall make only a few observations upon this description, sufficient to shew that it cannot be that of Paez, or any man who had ever been in Abyssinia: there is no such place known as Sabala; he should have called it Sacala: in the Ethiopic language Sacala means the highest ridge of land, where the water falls down equally on both sides, from east and west, or from north and south. So the sharp roofs of our houses, or tops of our tents, in that manner are called Sacala, because the water runs down equally on opposite sides; so does it in the highest lands in every country, and so here in Sacala, where the Nile runs to the north, but several streams, which form the rivers Lac and Temsi, fall down the cliff, or precipice, and proceed southward in the plain of Ashoa about 300 feet below the level of the ground where the mountain of Geesh stands, at the very foot of which is the marsh wherein are the sources of the river.
Again, neither Sacala nor Geesh are on the west side of Gojam, nor approach to these directions; as, first the high mountains of Litchambara, then the still higher of Amid Amid, are to be crossed over, before you reach Gojam from Sacala; and after descending from that high barrier of mountains called Amid Amid, you come into the province of Damot, when the whole breadth of that province is still between you and the west part of Gojam. These are mistakes which it is almost impossible to make, when a man is upon the spot, in the midst of a whole army, every one capable, and surely willing (as he was a favourite of the king) to give him every sort of information; nor was there probably any one there who would not have thought himself honoured to have been employed to fetch a straw for him from the top of Amid Amid.
Both the number and situations of the fountains, and the situations of the mountain and village of Geesh with respect to them, are therefore absolutely false, as the reader will observe in attending to my narrative and the map. This relation of Paez’s was in my hand the 5th of November, when I surveyed these fountains, and all the places adjacent. I measured all his distances with a gunter’s chain in my own hand, and found every one of them to be imaginary; and these measures so taken, as also the journal now submitted to the public, were fairly and fully written the same day that they were made, before the close of each evening.
It is not easy to conceive what species of information Paez intends to convey to us by the observation he makes lower, “That the water, which found way at the foot of the mountain, did not flow at the top of it.” It would have been very singular if it had; and I fully believe that a mountain voiding the water at its top, when it had free access to run out at its bottom, would have been one of the most curious things the two Jesuits could ever have seen in any voyage. But what mountain is it he is speaking of? he has never named any one, but has said the Nile was situated in the highest part of a plain. I cannot think he means by this that the highest part of a plain is a mountain; if he does, it is a species of description which would need an interpreter. He says again, the mountain is full of water, and trembles; and that there is a village below the top of the mountain, on the mountain itself. This I never saw; they must have cold and slippery quarters in that mountain, or whatever it is; and if he means the mountain of Geesh, there is not a village within a quarter a mile of it. The village of Geesh is in the middle of a high cliff, descending into the plain of Ashoa. The bottom of that cliff or plain is 300 feet, as I have already said, below the base of the mountain of Geesh, and the place where the fountains rise.