Among other interesting places they visited was a Coptic church. In the centre was a desk, at which a man was reading aloud to a number of other persons wearing large turbans, their shoes placed on one side, and several children, all sitting on a carpet, listening devoutly. On the walls were draperies and pictures of the Saviour, and within a doorway was a high altar, covered with a cloth marked with the figure of the cross. The service was in Arabic. A handsome old man entered, bearing a staff surmounted by a golden cross. After kneeling at the altar, he invited the strangers to his house to have coffee. Grant says that he never saw a finer face than that of this venerable Copt, Gabriel by name, who is at the head of the Coptic Church at Khartoum.
They left Khartoum on the 15th of April, and continued their journey down to Berber by water. Here they landed, and had a fatiguing camel ride across the desert to a place called Korosko, whence they continued it by water to Cairo. Here they were to part from their faithful Seedees, of whom Bombay was appointed captain. The Seedees received three years’ pay, and an order for a freeman’s garden to be purchased for them at Zanzibar, when each man was to receive ten dollars more as soon as he could find a wife. They ultimately, after many adventures, reached their destination.
The two travellers, whose adventures we have thus far followed, embarked for England, on the 4th of June, on board the “Pera,” where they safely arrived, after an absence of eleven hundred and forty-six days.
His friends had shortly afterwards to mourn Captain Speke’s untimely death, from his gun accidentally going off while at shooting. His gallant companion, now Colonel Grant, survives.
Although not, as he supposed, the discoverer of the remotest source of the Nile, Speke was undoubtedly the first European who saw the Victoria Nyanza, while the adventurous and hazardous journey he and Grant performed together deservedly places them in the first rank of African travellers. They also opened up an extensive and rich district hitherto totally unknown, into which the blessings of Christianity and commerce may, in a few years, be introduced. It is to be hoped that King Rumanika, the most intelligent ruler with whom they came in contact, still survives, as he would afford a cordial welcome both to missionaries and legitimate traders, and his beautiful and healthy country might become the centre of civilisation in that part of Eastern Africa. Were a mission sent to him by way of Zanzibar, backed by a body of disciplined, well-armed men, he would probably greatly assist in clearing the district intervening between the north of his dominions and that lately brought under subjection by
Sir Samuel Baker, and a speedy end might be put to the horrible cruelties of the barbarous Mtesa, King of Uganda. It is sad to reflect, however, that while Mahommedan Turks and Arabs are allowed to range at will over the wide regions of Africa and proselytise the heathen, so few Christian merchants or missionaries have made their way into the interior with the advantages their superior civilisation and pure faith would bestow on the hapless inhabitants.
We may yet hope with Captain Burton that, “as the remote is gradually drawn nigh, and the difficult becomes accessible, the intercourse of man—strongest instrument of civilisation in the hands of Providence—will raise Africa to that place in the great republic of nations, from which she has hitherto been unhappily excluded.”