Plural marriage is the custom with these natives, but a wife in Uganda is one-half cheaper than in Zululand, from four to six head of cattle being the standard price of a helpmate.
Bananas and sweet potatoes grow very bountifully, and these two vegetables comprise the principal food of the natives. The banana is boiled when green and eaten. The soil is rich and a chocolate color.
This was the only place in our tour of Africa where pretty birds were seen and also were heard singing. Birds in South Africa seldom sing. Parrots are on their native heath here.
The sun in that part of the world shines 12 hours a day the year round.
Automobiles, motor trucks, motorcycles and bicycles may be seen spinning along good roads.
My time had been overstayed in Entebbe, so we took our departure for Kampala, the native capital. The lake stopping-place is called Port Bell. Seven miles from the little port is located Kampala, the ancient capital of Uganda, and that distance is traveled in a government motor car. Rubber trees and banana groves line the roadway for the distance. About 75,000 natives live in Kampala, but the huts are so scattered and buried under banana bushes that one would not think there were one-third that number. It is another Rome, so far as hills are concerned. The government buildings are seen on one hill, the King's house and Ministers' houses on another, and a monastery and a mission stand on other hills. Four hundred Europeans comprise the population.
Our next landing from Kampala was Jinja, another port of Victoria Nyanza, and the most interesting of the lake stops, as we had reached the outlet of that body of water, Ripon Falls, where one looks at the starting point of the historical river Nile, the magnet that figured largely in my giving way to the witchery of the foreground when standing on the shore of the lake at Kisumu some weeks before.
J. H. Speke, an Englishman, in 1858, discovered Victoria Nyanza, but its outlet, hidden by green banks on each side, was not reached until four years later, on his second visit to that section of Africa. He named that neck of water Napoleon Gulf. Speke was the first to reveal the source of the river Nile, which had long been sought by the Egyptians, who had for ages been in the dark concerning the fountain-head of the river that meant so much to them in providing water to grow crops—their life, in fact. When it is recalled that rain has not fallen for thousands of years in some sections of the African continent through which the Nile flows, it is little wonder that the Egyptians were eager to learn of the river's source.
Ripon Falls, named by Speke after the president of the geographical society that financed his explorations, is located a mile from Jinja, and is only 12 feet high and 400 feet wide, but when that plunge has been taken the water becomes the river Nile. From Ripon Falls to Albert Nyanza the river is known as the Victoria Nile. On, on it flows through countries inhabited by savage tribes—by elephants, rhinoceroses, lions and hippopotami—through lakes and great swamps; still on and on through the Soudan, and even further northward, where it is halted for a time by the great Assouan Dam. It next passes through the desert to Alexandria, Egypt, where it becomes lost in the salted ocean, nearly 4,000 miles from its source.
Until a few years ago visitors to Ripon Falls were forbidden to go close to the section where the water makes its plunge from Victoria Nyanza to the River Nile, as the brush growing on both sides was infested with tsetse flies. The brush was finally cleared and lemon grass planted. One is not quite safe from being bitten even now, as on the opposite side the brush is dense, and the distance across the river would be none too far for a fly to journey. No one enters that brush unless their hands are covered, and face and neck protected with a heavy veil, to thwart any attack by that winged messenger of death.