To look on the sources of the Nile was ever a wish and dream. The conquerors of Egypt, at whatever time and of
whatever nation, longed to unravel the problem of its fountains. In the days when a settled population extended far into Nubia and a powerful state flourished at Meroë, near the junction of the White and Blue Nile, the tramp of armed hosts in search of the “mythical fountains,” favorite haunt of Jove himself when he wished seclusion, often resounded in the deep African interior. Sesostris, the first king who patronized map making, made attempts to discover these springs. Alexander the Great, Cambyses the Persian, and the Roman Cæsars, were inspired with the same wish. Julius Cæsar said he would give up civil war could he but look on the sources of the Nile. Nero sent out a vast exploring party who told of cataracts and marshes which compelled their return. These expeditions were formidable. They returned empty handed as to science, but generally loaded with spoils of conquest. The idea of a solitary explorer, with his life in his hand and good will toward all in his heart, encountering all the perils and privations of African travel for pure love of knowledge, is wholly a modern conception.
Let mention be made here of Ismail Pasha, ex-viceroy of Egypt. To the practices of an oriental despot he added the spirit of a man of modern science. To him, more than to any other man, do we owe a complete solution of the mystery of the Nile. He plunged Egypt into inextricable debt, he ground his people with taxes, but he introduced to them the light of western knowledge, he granted the concessions which built the Suez Canal, he sought out and annexed the sources of the Nile. For twenty years European pioneers and explorers, in his pay or under his protection, worked their way southward, mapping lakes and rivers, founding settlements, capturing slave gangs, until the entire Nile Valley either acknowledges Egypt or is open to commerce and civilization, unless forsooth the recent Soudanese protest, made by the fanatical El Mahdi and his followers, should prove to be more persistent and better sustained than now seems probable.
Our trip up the Nile to Assouan, or the first cataract, past the silent shapes of the temples, sphinxes and pyramids, surrounded by sights and sounds of Oriental life, was as pastime.
But now the holiday journey ends, and we are face to face with the realities and hardships of a Nubian desert. The Nile is no longer verdant on either side. The sands, dry and barren, form its shores. But that is not all. You skirt it to Korosko amid difficulties, and there you are at its great bend. If you followed it now to the next place of importance, Abu-Hammed, you would have to travel nearly 600 miles. The waters are broken by falls and the country is desolate. No one thinks of the journey, unless compelled to make it. The course is that of the caravans across the Korosko desert to Abu-Hammed. It is 400 miles of dreary waste, and calculated to burn out of the traveller any romance he may have entertained of Nubian adventure. Day marching over this desert is impossible at certain seasons. Night is given up to the uneasy motion of camel riding and the monotony of a desert tramp.
Do not think the ground is even. Here and there it is broken by wady’s or gulches, and as you descend into these the eye may be relieved with sight of vegetation. Perhaps a gazelle dashes away in fright to the nearest sand hills, or it may be you catch a glimpse of a naked Arab youth tending his flock of goats, for even desert wastes are not utterly void of plant and animal life.
These deserts are not even rainless, though as much as four years have been known to pass without a shower. A rain storm is watched with breathless hope by the nomad Arab tribes. They see the clouds drifting up from the distant Indian Ocean and pitching their black tents on the summits of the mountains that divide the Nile Valley from the Red Sea. A north wind may blow during the night and sweep them back whence they came. But more likely they burst into thunderstorm, as if all the storms of a season were compressed into one. The dry wadys of yesterday are roaring torrents by morning, bearing to the Nile their tribute of a single day, and for a day or a week, the desert air is pure and the desert sand shoots a tender vegetation, only to be withered, like Jonah’s gourd, in fewer hours than it sprang.
The Arab camel driver, however, knows well a few spots
where are running water and green turf the year round. These are the oases, or stepping stones, by means of which the burning wilderness may be crossed. Sometimes the wells fail, or have been poisoned or filled, or are in the possession of a hostile predatory band. Then the unfortunate traveller has to face death by thirst or exhaustion as he hurries on to the next halting place. At any rate he is profoundly thankful when the welcome waters of the Nile come into view again at Abu-Hammed, and he knows he is within safe navigable distance of Kartoum, at the junction of the White and Blue Nile.
And now, in passing from Abu-Hammed to Kartoum, we have a grand secret of the Nile. For twelve hundred miles above its mouth that mysterious river receives no tributary on the right hand nor on the left. It may be traced like a ribbon of silver with a narrow fringe of green, winding in great folds through a hot and thirsty desert and under the full blaze of a sun that drinks its waters but returns nothing in the shape of rain. And man also exacts a heavy tribute for purposes of irrigation. Whence its supply? Look for a partial answer to the Atbara, whose mouth is in the east bank of the Nile, half way from Abu-Hammed to Kartoum. Here light begins to break on the exhaustless stores of the Nile. During the greater part of the year the Atbara is dry. Not a hopeful source of supply, you say at once. The sources of the Atbara are away off to the east in the mountains of Abyssinia, whose great buttresses are now visible from the Nile Valley, and whose projections push to the Red Sea and Indian Ocean. There also are a Lake Region and Nile sources, whose discovery by Bruce a century ago gave the scientific world quite a stir. His account of this Abyssinian country, so unique in physical features, social life, history, religion and ancient remains, read so much like romance that it was not believed. But Beke, De Cosson, James Bruce and the great Livingstone, have since verified all and given him his proper place among accurate observers and intrepid travellers.