Once a Week (magazine)/Series 1/Volume 8/The old secret out at last
THE OLD SECRET OUT AT LAST.
These Whitsuntide holidays, and the news which has distinguished them, have brought to my mind the changes which have occurred since the short holidays—Easter and Whitsuntide—of my school days. In the early years of the century these were the seasons for enjoying favourite books; and in households where there was a bookish boy, he might be seen (unless he vanished to an attic, or into the orchard) lying on his stomach on a sofa, or on three chairs, devouring volume after volume, at a rate never attained in after life. In poetry the book was probably “Thalaba,”—the natural introduction then to the poetry reading of one’s life. If not poetry, it was pretty sure to be Mungo Park’s Travels. Most old people say that they have known nothing since comparable to the interest of that man’s life and exploits; and there can never again be the same kind of interest felt and recorded; for there is not left on our globe any vast region overhung with mystery, like the Africa of half a century ago. When the reading boy could rouse himself to get upon his feet, and fetch the atlas, to see where Park went, he found in the map of Africa only a great blank in the middle, with river mouths, and names of tribes and settlements round the coasts,—except when, here and there, dotted lines, very straight and unnatural-looking, showed where the great rivers were conjectured to tend. Our fathers’ map-sellers did not, like the ancient geographers, adorn these blank spaces with pictures of wild beasts and men, or horrible monsters; but there was not the less guesswork. Desert, in large letters, covered a good deal of paper: and on the strength of that insertion, our parents taught us that the interior of Africa was a place of hot sand and burning rocks, where only lions and their prey could live. But there was the rumour of the great city of Timbuctoo; and this roused an insatiable curiosity. Boys went back to Park’s Travels again and again, in a sort of hope of making out something more,—only to find that the point he reached was like the end of the world, where a wall of thick darkness rose to the very sky. Then ensued that state of mind which caused so much trouble to so many parents,—the longing of boys to go to sea. If some little lads hoped to be cast away on a desert island, to play Robinson Crusoe, others thought they could make their way to the Niger, if they once got away from England. The little girls were not far behind in enthusiasm. They all knew the story of the little moss on the stone which gave such comfort to Park; and they felt that of all mankind they should admire most the man who should learn Park’s fate and carry out his work.
The change since that time is prodigious; but it has been gradual. Schoolboys learned to attack the same mystery from another side, and experienced another set of feelings when they came to read about the conferences that Herodotus held with the old Egyptian priests about the Nile inundations, and the source of that most mysterious of rivers. They have taken for granted that a mighty range of Mountains of the Moon stretches across the continent somewhere not far from the equator; and this has stimulated further their longing to know what lies between Park’s furthest and those mountains.
Every few years some explorer went to try after the solution of the mystery and successive discoveries only revived the old feelings, if I may judge by myself. When each one was, sooner or later, compelled to turn back, the yearning was renewed. When a traveller, setting out from the north, made straight for Timbuctoo, the reader followed him from well to well in the desert, from village to village among the oases; and when it was impossible for the traveller to proceed, how thrilling was the last thing he saw! A mountain peak rose at an immense distance dim on the horizon. So it was not a blank which was left behind! What was that mountain? What might not have been known if he could only have reached it! Could he not have done just that much more? But in time that part of the scene was laid open: now a great lake, now a great river, which turned out to be the Niger, flowing quite differently from what had been supposed; and half a score great kingdoms, full of people and rich in produce, where lions had been imagined lords of the desert. At last, Dr. Barth got to Timbuctoo, and lived there, and brought us drawings of the place and the people, and full accounts of the road to it, and the kingdoms and populations between it and Lake Tchad.
At about the same distance south of the equator, Dr. Livingstone crossed the whole continent, and annihilated the blanks on the map in those latitudes; but there remained above twenty degrees still bare of names and signs between the Adamawi and Dr. Livingstone’s track; and old Nile was as mysterious as ever.
Among the great changes of the time, one of the most deeply felt is that of the accessibility of the Nile to so many of us. We can now know for ourselves, in faint reflection, the feelings of the explorers in gaining point after point, and having at last to turn back. These are sensations which cannot be communicated; and it is a privilege of the time, that so many can experience them. Passengers to India know nothing of them. There is a sort of emotion, no doubt, in first meeting the Nile at the junction with the canal from Alexandria: and there comes a deeper sense of its glory and venerableness when its course is traced upwards and downwards from the caves above Siout. Then the crocodiles begin to appear, and Coptic convents are left behind. Then the desert, with its rocks, closes in upon it; and vast quarries, even more than old temples, suggest the associations of the ancient world. Then comes Thebes, and the spectacle of the seated colossi, the eternal sentinels which create an awe like that of an admission to the presence of the ancient gods. It is the same set of associations which renders the approach to Philæ so magical an experience. To reach it in the failing evening light, to moor the boat beneath its temple walls in the moonlight, to look out in the night with the ancient oath sounding in one’s ear, “By Him who sleeps in Philæ,” and to spend days in the temples, following out on the pictured walls the apotheosis of Osiris, and the traditions of Isis, is worth any amount of travel to achieve. But all this is only connected with the Nile, and not the essential interest of the mysterious river itself.
That interest receives a sudden increase when the First Cataract and the sites of the civilisation of old Egypt are left behind. The river itself is the god of one’s imagination when one has left Osiris behind, buried and glorified. And it is time, when one gets to Nubia, to be profoundly impressed by the majestic primitive character of the mighty stream. The people grow wilder (while simpler and more engaging), the desert grows wilder, if possible; and the architectural remains grow more uncouth, more strange and solemn, till Aboo-Simbil carries up the tension to the highest point. That reach of the stream being passed, the Nile remains the sole engrossing interest. Here, after so many weeks of voyaging, its current is strong and full as below, and not more, for not a single tributary has fed its waters. Here it is, as it was six weeks back,—brown in the morning light, white in the noonday glare, and and lilac and pale green under the sunset sky,—always abundant and rapid, and always profoundly mysterious, sweeping past all who go so far to question it, without any chance token, for these many thousand years, which may afford even a guess of whence it comes, and why its annual overflow takes place. There are local incidents which deepen the sense of mystery. It is not (or was not lately) set down for us that hurricanes are to be looked for there: but each traveller finds himself the sport of the winds in that region within the tropic. They come pouncing down on his boat from between the hills, and sweeping across the desert, laying his vessel almost flat on the water, and whistling among the coarse grass and the lupins on the banks, and making the palms clatter like mills. Then, next day after reaching the eddies of the Second Cataract, comes the hour, the pain of which can hardly be anticipated. Then the primitive interest of the Nile is found to be stronger than all that arises from any settlements, in all ages, on its banks. The hour comes for turning back.
After a ride through a reach of hot desert, amidst whitened bones of perished camels, and a peeping jerboa here and there, or a brood of partridges flitting between the sandhills, with nothing green but the thick, fleshy leaves of the colocynth plant, the goal is reached,—the rock of Abousir. From its summit—a precipice two hundred feet directly above the Nile—the last view southwards is obtained,—the last for any but adventurous traders and explorers. Nothing can well be wilder than the scene, all made up of white sands and an infinity of black rocks, with the river swirling among them, and no living thing visible but the travellers’ asses at the foot of the rock, and the swarm of blue pigeons, scared from their holes by the tread of man. This is the immediate scene. Far away there may be a sail or two on the river which has been left behind; and eastward there are the remote Arabian hills: but all the interest lies in the South. There an immeasurable expanse of black, broken rocks spreads out, without any relief except two or three sparkles of the river, where its full current makes a bend among the clustering islets. But there is something beyond. Two mountain summits just appear on the horizon,—reminding one of the two peaks from which the explorer from Tripoli was obliged to turn away. If it was affecting to read of that view southward, it is more so to make the farewell in one’s own person here. By reaching those peaks, one would be far on one’s way to Dongola; and there, one might look forward to Kordofan, and feel as if one was drawing near to the source of the Nile. “The source of the Nile;”—that is indeed the interest here. As the traveller seats himself in his boat, and after he has sighed over the change in its appearance, trimmed in his absence for the return voyage, he dwells upon the old, old question,—“What, then, is this river Nile? Whence does it come? How can such a channel be filled? And why does it overflow every year with such punctuality that its half-dozen failures since human history began are among the marvels of human calamity?”
These are the very same questions that were ancient to the Egyptian priests, when they talked the matter over with Herodotus, four centuries and a-half before our era. Among the old Greeks, who were upstarts in the eyes of the Egyptians, this was one of the first speculations in the course of their studies of Nature, by travel and research. No doubt Moses heard it treated when he was acquiring the learning of the Egyptians in his youth: and in Abraham’s time the subject must have been just as interesting as it could ever be afterwards. Up to this very year, there never was any proposal of a solution which the cultivated reason of society could receive. After leaving behind poetical notions of gods pouring out waters from urns, or creating inexhaustible springs for the occasion; and of mighty mountains, scaling heaven with their snowy peaks at the equator; and of the miraculous drop which yearly came down from heaven upon some place in Abyssinia;—after leaving this region of fable, there was nothing else to consider and judge of,—no theory, no hypothesis, which could be advanced a hair’s-breadth by study or reasoning, because there were no materials to proceed upon. Of old, the Egyptians pitied the Greeks on account of their liability to famine, because their crops depended on such an uncertainty as water from the fickle clouds: and the Greeks at the same time pitied the Egyptians on account of their liability to famine, because their crops depended on such an uncertainty as the mysterious overflow of a mysterious stream, of the origin of which nothing was known. Modern men have trusted, more wisely and humbly, to the action of natural laws: but, this being settled, they had nothing to say about the Nile. They could only encourage something being done. A good deal has been done accordingly in the way of exploration, further and further south, within the last forty years; but still the secret was not discovered by that course.
The first question was a very old one,—viz., which of three streams which meet at and below Khartoum afforded the best chance of turning out to be the true Nile? Ptolemy preferred the west; and most moderns have been of his mind. This was the stream explored by Linant Bey in 1827, as far as 132 geographical miles south of Khartoum (and nearly due east, we may observe, of the northern shore of Lake Tchad in the interior). Several expeditions, sent from Cairo, under the command of European scientific explorers, pursued the same track, advancing a little further and a little further: and of these Dr. Knoblecher, head of a Catholic mission at Khartoum, seems to have seen most. He penetrated to within five degrees of the equator, and saw mountains whereas the earlier explorers saw no appearance of high grounds. Dr. Krapf, who explored from the east, twelve years ago, heard from the natives an account which appears very striking now;—that a river (which he supposed to be the Nile) issued from a large lake at the foot of mountains, and flowed through another lake lying to the north, the body of water being altogether enormous. But there was no knowing how much to believe of this.
On the whole, men’s imagination had descended from the regions of fable, chiefly through the cultivation of geological and other science. It was a memorable day when Sir Roderick Murchison made known his opinion (prior to the recent explorations from the north), that the interior of Africa was not a parched desert of sand and rocks, but a great basin of habitable, and probably fertile land, watered by large rivers and lakes, and containing diversities of level, short of miraculous snowy mountains, in contrast with barren sands. If some of the awe about the infant Nile began to dissolve, the interest was stimulated by a fresh curiosity: and on Dr. Livingstone’s return, we all learned very quickly to picture the interior of Africa to ourselves as crowded with tropical vegetation, gleaming with waters, and all alive with men and animals, instead of dreaming of burning red granite mountains, or black basalt, or glaring white rocks and yellow sands, like those of Arabia.
There was some interest for us in the travels in Abyssinia of late years; but it was not of the same kind. Old Christian traditions hang about that region; and some modern missions have attracted attention towards it. There are some good commercial chances in that country; and a political interest is involved in the anxiety of the French to establish themselves in Abyssinia, so as to have a command of the Red Sea; but if we wanted discovery about the Nile, there seemed to be more promise in an expedition entering by way of Zanzibar.
Here we were, indeed, on the threshold of the discovery which all civilised races have longed for from time immemorial. The book by Captain Burton, which laid open to us the country from the coast to the great Lake Tanganyika, was as little attractive as such a book could be. Captain Burton has done great things, but he does not write pleasant books. His intrepid act of going through the pilgrimage to Mecca and Medina as a Mohammedan has dispersed the mystery of these very exclusive sanctuaries; and his exploration towards Lake Tanganyika, and survey of a part of it, afford valuable additions to our knowledge of Africa. But his health suffered, as that of African explorers always does; and his temper seems to have suffered in consequence. It is impossible to overlook this fact, because his feelings vented themselves chiefly upon the man whom we are now all delighting to honour. Captain Speke was Burton’s comrade on that expedition which was Speke’s first stage in a journey which will be immortal. They parted at Kazeh, whence Speke went northward to see about the great lake reported to be there, and with a strong hope of standing at the source of the Nile, unconscious of any liberties that might be taken with his name. He need not care for them now. His achievement is an all-sufficient answer to any question of his qualifications from any quarter; and perhaps it is not too much to hope that Captain Burton himself, as he sits in his verandah at Fernando Po, and reads the next batch of English newspapers that reaches him, will feel more pleasure than pain, like a generous man, at the account of what Speke has done. He will see how the case stands; and if sorry that he did not appreciate his comrade better, he will rejoice that the mistake has done no lasting harm. The feat is achieved; the man is justified; and there should be no exception to the world’s rejoicing.
Captain Speke had a comrade in his turn—Captain Grant,—also an Indian officer: and while they were making for the equator from the south, a brave and accomplished party were hoping to meet them there from the north. Mr. and Mrs. Petherick had gone up the White Nile, past the limit of vision; and they were bent on achieving the great discovery before they reappeared. We all talked bravely about them, as we always do when bold explorers go forth; and we could truthfully say that they had far better chances of safety and success than any of their predecessors had had, from Mr. Petherick’s previous residence at Khartoum, his habit of intercourse with the natives, and the exploratory journeys he had already made: yet we could not be surprised when the news came that the party had been robbed, and Mr. and Mrs. Petherick drowned in the Nile. Their relatives wore mourning for them: and it is probable that we all felt very nearly hopeless about Speke and Grant, who had the dangers of the Pethericks to go through, besides all those that lay behind.
They were coming on, however. In a few months, or less, we shall hear the whole story, in full detail, from themselves; so I need say but little of it here, beyond stating the great fact that Captains Speke and Grant have followed the whole course of the White (the real) Nile from the lake it issues from, except that, in one case where it makes a great loop, they went straight across the land it encloses. There is no uncertainty arising out of this. They learned^ from the natives the story of its course between the two points at which they stood; and the discovery is complete. This does not mean that they saw or calculated all the contributions to the great stream which was flowing on from their feet to the Mediterranean. A future time will show how many rivers flow out of the two great lakes, and as many others as there may be. It is enough for the present that we know how the Nile is what it is. There are mountains—a group, not a range—to collect tropical rains. There are lakes, long and broad, but apparently shallow, which receive the waters, but cannot contain them, after the rainy season, and which must therefore overflow; and that overflow makes the Nile, with its punctual inundation.
The imagery of the scene is unlike what the imagination of men has conceived for all the past ages during which the human mind has been bent in that direction. Two degrees south of the equator, from the middle of the northern shore of a vast lake issues the stream, about 150 yards wide, first leaping down a fall of twelve feet, and then off and away for Egypt,—making further falls, or courses of rapids (a descent of 1000 feet, in the circuit which the travellers did not follow), and then on and on, through fertile plains, where the cattle are as innumerable as on the Pampas of South America; and through rank vegetation, where the elephants make paths for themselves to drink of old Nile. Instead of a group of old gods on a mountain, sitting by a spring-head, and blessing it as they send it forth on its course of 2000 miles, the travellers found tribes of men, more astonished at the sight of white faces than the white-faced men were with anything they found at the source of the mystery they were solving. Some of the black nations about those lakes were found more intelligent, and some less. We shall hear all about them by and by.
Meantime, few of us, I believe, will have much sympathy with writers or speakers whose first inquiry was about the use of this discovery. It may or may not be true that there is a prospect of a considerable trade all the way up the river to the equator, and beyond it. That may be all very well when we have become accustomed to the thought that the last great secret of our planet (of its surface at least) is told to our generation. For nearly two centuries it has seemed strange and unnatural that we should have learned so many secrets of the heavens,—should have actually ascertained how the solar system is what it is, and does what it does, and that there should be anything on the earth’s surface hidden from us that we desire to know. That anomaly is at an end: and we do not want to think of commercial or other advantages on the same day with such a fact.
Next comes the human interest of the story. Can anything be conceived more exhilarating than the meeting at Gondokoro, which will stand in English, and in other than English history? The Pethericks were not drowned in the Nile, but ready on its banks to meet the countrymen who were descending in their glory from the high regions of the equator. Another fine fellow was there too,—another generous rival in the work of discovery, Mr. Baker—Samuel Baker, whose name already stands high, and is likely to stand higher, among African explorers.
Speke might well say that he was never so happy in his life. Mr. Petherick handed him a letter from his London patrons, announcing praise and reward for former feats: and Mr. Baker supplied him and Captain Grant with stores and money, to set them well forward on their way home. From that meeting, high up in the tropics, our minds glance into the English homes of these brave men and women, at the moment when Captain Speke’s father, down in Somersetshire, heard of his safety, and his certainty of renown; and when the Pethericks’ relatives threw off their mourning; and Mr. Baker’s friends were told of what he had done, and what thanks the Geographical Society at once voted him. But we have no business on that private ground.
The Indian Government is as sympathetic as could be desired. It grants further leave of absence to both its great geographical captains to July, 1864, with pay: and thus we shall have their books prepared under the most advantageous conditions. The Pasha of Egypt sent up a steam-boat to bring down the men he delighted to honour; and we have heard of them, not only by Speke’s letter to Murchison, but from gazers who saw them at Assouan, at Thebes, at Cairo. I am writing of them as still in Africa; but before what I write is published, they will doubtless be in London, being expected there for the meeting of the Geographical Society on the 8th of June.
One speculation on such occasions is whether men who have done such a deed can ever relish ordinary life like other people. Captain Speke is, we are told, about forty years of age, of great stature and strength. It does not seem probable that he will settle down into ordinary military life, any more than Park could settle down into his old practice as a country surgeon. Perhaps our heroes may find new fields of exploration. Meantime, they have enough to do for many months to come in bringing us up to the knowledge which the Pharaohs and the Greeks longed for in vain.
Together with news of commercial profits of ten per cent. per month at Khartoum, we hear promises of a telegraph wire above Khartoum, and rails up to nobody knows where, and across to the Red Sea. If such things are possible to the great power of the Pasha, we may learn more than we ever hoped of the inhabitants of the regions where the old gods are certainly not living at this day. But those of us who are neither statesmen nor commercial speculators are in no hurry for more than we have got. Sufficient for our day is it that somebody has stood at the source of the Nile.