Meantime the following letter about the Nile appeared from Mr. Findlay (Athenæum, March 21, 1874, No. 2421):—
"The Source of the Nile.
"Dulwich Wood, March 18, 1874.
"It is somewhat remarkable that each accession to our knowledge of Lake Tanganyika has added to the difficulties of the Nile problem; for while oral testimony almost universally points towards its connection with that great river, yet the two occasions on which its northern end was examined would seem, at first sight, to negative such a solution. There are many other evidences in favour of its having a northern outlet, in addition to those which have been well adduced by Mr. Mott, in the Athenæum of March 14th, and those in my letter which you inserted in the Athenæum of February 28th.
"Mr. Stanley's account of the puny and insignificant streamlet which he was told was the Rusizi river, shows that it cannot be taken to have any weight whatever on the solution of the great enigma. The journey he describes has overturned the basis of Captain Speke's theory of the existence of lunar mountains. He does not say one word about the existence of the eleven great rivers which Captain Speke was told fell into the northern head of Tanganyika, therefrom inferring that they rose in an extensive and lofty mountain chain which entirely separated the Tanganyika lake from the Nile basin.
"Captain Speke, in his account of the share he took in the Burton-Speke expedition,[3] gives a most explicit account of an outward flow at the north end of the lake, from the statement of Sheikh Hamed, a respectable Arab merchant, one of a class whose trustworthy testimony was proved by the way in which Captain Burton was enabled to lay down on their map the outlines of rivers and countries they could not visit in their expedition of 1856-58. Sheikh Hamed, after an accurate description of Lake Tanganyika and the rivers which flow into it, says, 'On a visit to the northern end, I saw one which was very much larger than either of these (the Marungu and the Malagarázi), and which I am certain flowed out of the lake; for although I did not venture on it ... I went so near its outlet that I could see and feel the outward drift of the water.' This is in exact accordance with the observations of Dr. Livingstone and Mr. Stanley, quoted heretofore.
"The late venerable Mr. Macqueen published, in 1845,[4] a very circumstantial account of another Arab, Lief ben Saied's visit to the great African lake, of course unknown at that time to Europeans. He says, 'It is well known by all the people there that the river which goes through Egypt takes its origin and source from the lake.'
"These extracts, with many others, have been frequently quoted before in the discussion of the most ancient geographic problem yet left to us, and I will not extend them by any reference to many mediæval speculations, based on the evidently correct and much misunderstood geography of Ptolemy, and but to only one of comparatively modern times, the first announcement from authentic information. It is that given by Pigafetta, among many wild speculations of his own, from the authority of Duarte (or Odoardo) Lopez, in his 'Relatione del Reaine di Congo,' published in 1591. He states that 'there are two lakes, ... situated north and south of each other, in almost a direct line, and about four hundred miles asunder. Some persons in these countries are of opinion that the Nile, after leaving the first lake, hides itself underground, but afterwards rises again.... The Nile truly has its origin in this first lake, which is in 12° south latitude, ... and it runs four hundred miles due north, and enters another very large lake, which is called by the natives a sea, because it is two hundred and twenty miles in extent, and it lies under the equator.'[5] I will not now extend these quotations, but the last-named author, as has been pointed out by Mr. R. H. Major, has indicated the connection between the two lakes on his map as 'Lagoa,' a lagoon or shallow, coinciding exactly with Sir Samuel Baker's information.
"I trust that the expeditions now on foot in Africa will settle this great controversy, and secure for England and the Royal Geographical Society the honour of finally closing the canon of ancient geography, and completing the grand discoveries commenced by Captain Burton in 1857, which has been denied to the greatest explorer that ever existed, Dr. Livingstone.
"But there is one aspect of the geographic solution which may be thought by many not so desirable as the simple fact of the final determination of a grand geographic problem. It may be demonstrated that Lake Tanganyika and its southern extension, the beautiful Lake Liemba, first seen by Dr. Livingstone, and its tributaries, reaching to the cold highlands where that great man's earthly career ended, all belong to the basin of the Nile. If it be the determination of the Khedive that Egypt and the Nile basin shall be conterminous, there may be something to deplore on the missionary object of the great traveller's life. The Mohammedan influence, which has been so forcibly dwelt on of late by Sir Samuel Baker, may, in these distant regions, become paramount, and the telegrams of to-day tell us that by great efforts the navigation of the Nile has been opened up to Gondokoro, so that it behoves Europe to make strenuous exertions to prevent the great efforts she has made to open Africa to Western civilization from being turned to her detriment.
"A. G. Findlay."
We now took very much to our life up in the Karso, walking up without servants, and staying part of the week, and taking immense long drives or immense long walks over the country, searching for inscriptions and castellieri, and of the former we generally took squeezes. When we first began this we were occasionally invited out shooting by the family proprietors of the inn; but we never saw anything, after miles of walking over stony country, but an occasional hare, and for our parts, as we were not hungry, we used to fire everywhere excepting at them, and they generally got off. But one day as we were going along we asked, "What are we going to shoot to-day?" and so they said, "Foxes." So we looked very grave, and we said, "But don't you know that it is against the English religion to shoot a fox?" And they said, "No, is it?" and we said, "Yes, we must turn back;" and so they agreed to sacrifice the day's shooting if we would go out with them, and Richard chaffed them, pretending that he thought that Adam and Eve had been turned out of Paradise for shooting a fox. (We had just seen it in Punch, where two little children had just been wondering why Adam and Eve were turned out of Paradise, and the boy, the son of a sporting parson, said, "Perhaps he shot a fox!")
On Sunday, the 15th of November, we lost some friends. Captain Nevill and his wife, née Lever, sailed for India, having had an offer to command the Nizam's troops in Hyderabad (Deccan), where they have now been eighteen years, and have risen to a great position there. I had now (November 20th) finished writing my "Inner Life of Syria," 2 vols., which occupied me sixteen months, and on Christmas Eve handed my manuscripts over to the publisher. It came round to end of 1874.
This month Richard went to have some teeth out by gas, but the gas did not have any effect on him at all. Believing that they were playing a trick, and that there was no gas in it, it was tried on me, and I went off directly.
My Arab Girl goes Home to be married.
Richard now proposed a thing which disconcerted me considerably, and that was to send me to England to transact some business for him, and to bring out books, and I was to start with several pages of directions, and he would join me later on. I had only been two years in Trieste, and it made me exceedingly miserable; but whenever he put his foot down, I had to do it, whether I would or no. I was getting very unhappy about my poor little Arab maid; she had been very much petted and spoiled; she was getting quite beyond my orders, and would only do what she fancied. It was not easy to marry her in Europe, so that I felt her life would be thrown away. I therefore wrote to her father, to tell him that we proposed to send her home under the charge of the captain and the stewardess of the first ship direct to Beyrout, and that he should meet her, and that he should try and marry her to some of her own people if possible. I told her she had often reproached me with not being able to give her a holiday; that England had disagreed with her so much before, I was afraid to take her back, and that she had better profit of my visit to England to go and see her parents. She liked very much the idea of going to show all her fine clothes and pretty things, and a good sum of money I had saved for her, and she started off with nine boxes full, and a purse full of gold, and before long I heard to my great relief that she had married one of her own people, and was settled down in the Buká'a. It was nevertheless a great wrench to part with her, and we always keep up our affection and correspond in broken Arabic and broken English.
On the 4th of December I put her on board, and I left on the 8th, and never stopped till I reached Paris, and next day went on to Boulogne, arriving in London on the 12th. At Dijon a little Frenchman, hearing me speak German to my maid, accused me of insulting his sister and throwing down her shawl, collected a crowd, had my little dog taken from me and put into the dog-box, although I had taken a ticket to hold it on my knees. I vainly explained that I had never seen either the sister or the shawl, so that I could not have insulted them; and I was very meek, because I was alone. When he found out I was an Englishwoman, he almost cried with vexation for what he had done. In England I was to study up the Iceland sulphur mine affair with Mr. L——, and then to see an immense lot of publishers for Richard. My work was pretty well cut out for me, and I got so wrapped up in it, that sometimes I worked for thirteen hours a day, and would forget to eat. They would come and put a tray by my side with something on it, and I can remember once, after working for thirteen hours, feeling my head whirling, and being quite alarmed, and then I suddenly remembered that I had forgotten to eat anything all day, which I at once did, and recovered.
During the two years we had been at Trieste Richard had occupied himself with writing the "Lands of the Cazembe,"[6] and a small pamphlet of supplementary papers for the Royal Geographical Society, 1873; the "Captivity of Hans Stadt," for the Hakluyt, 1874; articles on "Rome" (two papers, Macmillan's Magazine, 1874-5); the poem of "Uruguay," which has never been published; and "Volcanic Eruptions of Iceland" for the Royal Society of Edinburgh; the "Castellieri of Istria," Anthropological Society, 1874; a "New System of Sword Exercise," a manual, 1875; "Ultima Thule;" "A Summer in Iceland" (2 vols., 1875), which though written had not appeared; "Gorilla Land; or, the Cataracts of the Congo" (2 vols., 1875). Also we had been to Bologna for the express purpose of exploring all the Etruscan remains, and he had produced two volumes of "Etruscan Bologna;" "The Long Wall of Salona, and the Ruined Cities of Pharia and Gelsa di Lesina," a pamphlet, Anthropological Society, 1875; "The Port of Trieste, Ancient and Modern" (Journal of the Society of Arts, October 29th and November 5th, 1875): and Gerber's "Province of Minas Geraes," translated and annotated by him for the Royal Geographical Society; and a fresh paper for the Anthropological on "Human Remains and other Articles from Iceland." So that my charge was the bringing out of three books, and the "Manual of Sword Exercise." This last, when he arrived, he took himself to his Royal Highness the Duke of Cambridge, who desired him to show him several of the positions of defence he most liked, and a system of manchette, with which he appeared particularly pleased, and Richard returned enchanted with his interview. Richard criticizes the English system of broadsword, which, he says, is the worst in the world. With this pamphlet he has done, for broadsword exercise, what a score of years ago he did for bayonet exercise, and he was confident that the Horse Guards will eventually adopt it. The last revised English edition, by MacLaren, at that time dated half a century before. A thousand writers have been at this subject for three hundred and fifty years, and yet Richard found lots of new things to say about it.