With Commoro, chief of the Latookas, Mr. Baker had a religious conversation. The savage was clever, even subtile. He does not appear, however to have shaken the faith of the traveller. Probably had Mr. Baker been a Bishop (Colenso) trained in the theology of the schools, he might have been driven crazy by this mid-African counterpart of the famous Zulu. The natives exhume the bones of their dead, and celebrate a sort of dance round them; and Mr. Baker asked his Latookan friend--
"Have you no belief in a future existence after death? Is not some idea expressed in the act of exhuming the bones after the flesh is decayed?"
Commoro (loq.)--"Existence after death! How can that be? Can a dead man get out of his grave unless we dig him out?"
"Do you think a man is like a beast that dies and is ended?"
Commoro.--"Certainly. An ox is stronger than a man, but he dies, and his bones last longer; they are bigger. A man's bones break quickly; he is weak."
"Is not a man superior in sense to an ox? Has he not a mind to direct his actions?"
Commoro.--"Some men are not so clever as an ox. Men must sow corn to obtain food, but the ox and wild animals can procure it without sowing."
"Do you not know that there is a spirit within you more than flesh? Do you not dream and wander in thought to distant places in your sleep? Nevertheless, your body rests in one spot. How do you account for this?"
Commoro (laughing.)--"Well, how do you account for it?"
. . .
"If you have no belief in a future state, why should a man be good? Why should he not be bad, if he can prosper by wickedness?"
Commoro. --"Most people are bad; if they are strong, they take from the weak. The good people are all weak; they are good because they are not strong enough to be bad."
Extremes meet; there are sages of modern days whose much learning has brought them up to the intellectual pitch of the savage's materialism. They might, ingenious as they are, even take a lesson in sophistry from the Latookan. When driven into a corner by the use of St. Paul's metaphor, the astute Commoro answered:
"Exactly so; that I understand. But the original grain does not rise again; it rots, like the dead man, and is ended. The fruit produced is not the same grain that was buried, but the production of that grain. So it is with man. I die, and decay, and am ended; but my children grow up, like the fruit of the grain. Some men have no children, and some grains perish without fruit; then all are ended."
Nevertheless, the Latookans continue to dig out the bones of their kindred, and to perform a rite around them which is manifestly a tradition from the time when a belief in the immortality of the soul existed among them.
It was impossible for Mr. Baker to reach the Lake toward which he pressed without appeasing Kamrasi, King of the Unyoros. But to do this was not easy when his stock of presents was getting low, and his men were so few and weak as to inspire no barbarian prince with the slightest fear. Yet, though debilitated with fever, his quinine exhausted, and Mrs. Baker stricken down in the disease, he pressed on with an unquenchable zeal--one would almost write worthy of a better cause. Finally, he was abundantly rewarded. Hurrying on in advance of his escort he reached at last, ere the sun had risen on what proved afterward a brilliant day, the summit of the hills that hem the great valley occupied by the vast Nile Source. There it lay "a sea of quicksilver" far beneath, stretching boundlessly off to the vast Blue Mountains which, on the opposite side towered upward from its bosom, and over whose breasts cascades could be discerned by the telescope tumbling down in numerous torrents. Standing 1500 feet above the level of the Lake, Mr. Baker shouted for joy that "England had won the Sources of the Nile!" and called the gigantic reservoir the Albert N'Yanza. The Victoria and Albert Lakes, then, are the [{833}] Nile Sources. Clambering down the steep--his wife, just recovered from fever, and intensely weak, leaning upon him--Mr. Baker reached the shore at length of the great expanse of water, and rushing into it, drank eagerly, with an enthusiasm almost reaching the ancient Egyptian point of Nile-worship.
Mr. Baker describes the Albert Lake as the grand reservoir, and the Victoria as the Eastern source.
"The Nile, cleared of its mystery, resolves itself into comparative simplicity. The actual basin of the Nile is included between about the 22° and 39° east longitude, and from 3° south to 18° north latitude. The drainage of that vast area is monopolized by the Egyptian river. . . The Albert N'Yanza is the great basin of the Nile: the distinction between it and the Victoria N'Yanza is, that the Victoria is a reservoir receiving the eastern affluents, and it becomes the starting-point or the most elevated source at the point where the river issues from it at the Ripon Falls; the Albert is a reservoir not only receiving the western and southern affluents direct from the Blue Mountains, but it also receives the supply from the Victoria and from the entire equatorial Nile basin. The Nile, as it issues from the Albert N'Yanza is the entire Nile; prior to its birth from the Albert Lake it is not the entire Nile."
". . . Ptolemy had described the Nile sources as emanating from two great lakes that received the snows of the mountains in Ethiopia. There are many ancient maps existing upon which these lakes are marked as positive. There can be little doubt that trade had been carried on between the Arabs from the Red Sea and the coast opposite Zanzitan in ancient times, and that the people engaged in such enterprises had penetrated so far as to have gained a knowledge of the existence of the two reservoirs."
The interest of Mr. Baker's volumes of course culminates with his account of the Great Lake. He embarked in a canoe of the country, and with his party in another, navigated it for a long distance, encountering storms and weathering them with a skill and courage which show him as cool and experienced a traveller on sea as on land. On his return overland he was again in perils oft. But the same undying spirit which supported him through a dozen fevers carried him through every danger triumphantly. The English nation has reason to be proud of such men, and of such women as Mrs. Baker still more. Devotion like hers honors the sex. There is an end, however, of Nile voyaging with the old object. If the Victoria and Albert Lakes are revisited it will be in pursuit of other ends than mere geographical inquiry or curiosity. Mr. Baker seems to think that missionaries may be the first to follow in the track he has made, and it is a fact that next to professional explorers (if even second to them) those influenced by religious zeal have made the most daring expeditions into unknown regions. Livingstone has done even more in another part of Africa than Baker did on the great level, which, as he thinks, from its altitude, escaped being submerged at any previous part of the world's history, and may contain at this moment the descendants of a pre-Adamite race. On the ethnology of the central Africans he can throw no light, and his mere speculations are worthless, but he is doubtless right in considering that commerce must precede religious propagandism among those races, if anything is really to be done for their benefit. For commerce there are large opportunities, if only the abominable slave-trade, which makes fiends of the natives, were effectually suppressed. Mr. Baker writes warmly on this point, and none knows better the character and extent of the evil. A more interesting book of travel was never written than his Albert N'Yanza: in every page there is fresh and vivid interest. The author, who is admirable in many things, is a model narrator, and there is no romance at all equal in attraction to the simple and unvarnished, but full and picturesque, account of his protracted and exciting travels.