on with Cameron, but the everlasting difficulty about pagazi— porters, beasts of burden determined him to decline the offer. He resolved to go on alone; and from this time the story of the expedition is simply the story of Cameron's adventure -of what he suffered, what he endured, and, let us not forget it, what he did. mulcted in mhongo, or toll. But that being paid, the natives were friendly enough, and supplied him with guides, one of whom was the proud possessor of an umbrella, under the shade of which he strutted in a condition of pristine nudity. Throughout, the country was beautiful, apparently fertile to an exuberant degree; the climate, too, does not appear to be bad; and the rain, though at times extremely heavy, is so only in sharp and On the 9th of November, Livingstone's caravan, with Dillon and Murphy, started for the coast, and Cameron on his westward route. The parting was a solemn short bursts, with occasional storms of one, for Dillon was very ill, and Cameron thunder and lightning: even during the far from well. He was, he tells us, nearly rainy season it is not excessive. Colonel blind from ophthalmia, and very weak Grant has estimated the annual rainfall at from the fever which was still hanging Unyanyembe and northwards at about about, and had reduced him to a mere thirty-four inches, or three-fourths of what skeleton: his weight on leaving Taborah it is at Plymouth; and, without any measwas only seven stone four. It seemed urements, that of Ugara would appear to more than probable that the two friends be about the same. then separating would meet no more in life, and this probability was in fact fulfilled; for on the 18th, Dillon, who was suffering from the complicated effects of dysentery and fever, being left alone, in an access of delirium shot himself through the head. Diplomatic difficulties and the caprice of his mob of pagazi compelled Cameron from this point to make a considerable bend to the southward, and to follow a route midway between the direct line taken by Burton, and the still more devious track which had been forced on Stanley. This was, in reality, fortunate, as it opened out to him a district till then unexplored, and thus threw new light on the river system which feeds Tanganyika on the east. The country, at a high level (thirty-eight hundred feet), was for the most part flat, though here and there undulating and of a park-like beauty, in which "clumps of magnificent trees were grouped with an effect that could not have been surpassed had they been arranged by the art of the landscape gardener." Owing to this prevailing flatness, the rivers during the wet season spread to a great width. The South Ngombé, one of the southern affluents of the Malagarazi, spreads, in time of flood, "about three miles on either side," giving thus to a minor tributary a total width of six miles. Passing through Ugara, he was heavily But the country, notwithstanding its great natural advantages, is desolate. A state of war is perpetual, and is kept up as a matter of interest by slave-drivers, with whom commercial success meansplundering a village. Travelling through a land in this ingrained state of anarchy is necessarily difficult, and so Cameron found it. Belonging to no party, he was His intentions were suspected by all. peaceful, but that the natives could neither believe nor understand: they attributed his moderation to weakness, and their demands for mhongo tribute-increased accordingly. They were to some extent right; for whilst he had laid down as a rule that exploration was not to be pushed at the risk of bloodshed, he had neglected that great political rule which teaches that the best security for peace is a preparation for war, and he was thus at the mercy of every black ruffian who called himself a chief, and had some halfhundred other ruffians in his train. He had no warlike equipment, and his men would seem to have been the veriest set of cowards that were ever got together, even in tropical Africa. Some illustrations of this read comically enough now, though they could scarcely have appeared so at the time. On one occasion a solitary buffalo, taking a playful gallop over the plain, caused a general stampede: burdens, guns, everything that could im pede flight was thrown away, and the bearers with one consent sought safety up or behind the nearest trees. On the 2nd of February they crossed the Sindi, the main southern branch of the Malagarazi, and which indeed is formed by the junction of every important tributary on the south. Its size appears to be quite equal to that of the northern branch, which Burton has spoken of as the Malagarazi itself, being so far in error that the Malagarazi which falls into the Tanganyika Lake is as much a southern as a northern stream, and drains the country to the south-east as well as to the north-east. The manner of crossing the Sindi, a deep stream a hundred yards wide, was peculiar. A dense vegetable growth, extending about threequarters of a mile down the river, had covered the whole breadth, leaving only, on each side, a channel about two feet wide. This growth, becoming closely matted together and mixed up with earth and mud, in which different plants take root and twine into a compact mass, forms an island or bridge, over which one may walk safely, though with a feeling like stepping on a quaking bog. Such bridges continue to grow for about six years, when they are from three to four feet thick: they then begin to rot, and in about four years more they break up. In this latter stage of decay, while seeming still sound, they are very dangerous, and cases are on record of whole caravans, attempting to pass over them, being engulfed and lost. The bridge over the Sindi, however, held firm, and Cameron's party passed without accident. A few days later, travelling in a northerly direction, they came to the northern branch of the Malagarazi, which, after a tedious dispute about the necessary payment, was crossed in canoes; and a march of nine days brought them to the eastern shore of Lake Tanganyika, where Cameron was able to take boat on to Ujiji, a distance of little more than an hour. It will be remembered that Lake Tanganyika, the semi-mythical existence of which had been reported three centuries ago by Portuguese writers, was first authentically seen by Captain Burton on the 13th of February, 1858; and the peculiar features of its geography have been, ever since, the cause of much dispute, which is so far needless, as they cannot possibly be settled without actual and positive evidence. The all important question has been, and — notwithstanding all that has been done and said — still is, whether the Tanganyika drains into Baker's Albert Nyanza, or not: in other words, is Tanganyika the head of the Nile? Burton, in 1858, taking boat at Ujiji, crossed over to the north-west, and sailed along some forty miles of its northwest coast to Uvira, beyond which his boatman refused to proceed. He had been told of a northerly outflow, but the information gathered at Uvira contradicted this, and named the Rusizé as flowing into the lake. Owing to the imperfections of his instruments, Speke's observations, on this occasion, gave the height of the lake above sea-level as only eighteen hundred and fifty feet; and though this was suspected to be wrong from the first comparison of the instruments; and though, on the strength of this comparison, Mr. Findlay very positively laid down the height at twenty-eight hundred feet, a correction which was very generally accepted; it was not till Cameron visited the lake, with a mercurial barometer, that its height above sea-level was really estab lished. According to his observations, it is taventy-seven hundred and ten feet, and there is no reason to doubt that that is approximately correct. When Baker had found the level of the Albert Nyanza to be about twenty-seven hundred and twenty feet, an estimate which was supposed to err in excess, the very great importance of this question was at once felt; for if Findlay's correction of Speke's observation was to be received, the correspondence between the levels of the two lakes inevitably suggested the idea of a connection; and we do not think that the doubt on this point has yet been satisfactorily cleared up. And it is just this point on which the old problem of the Nile sources now hangs. We propose, therefore, to state what is really known about Lake Tanganyika, distinguishing it from what is only guessed at, or believed. When the American traveller, Stanley, joined Livingstone at Ujiji, in November, 1871, Livingstone, speaking of the geogra phy of Tanganyika, at first said that he had not the least doubt that the lake was connected with the Albert Nyanza by a river flowing out; basing his opinion on native reports, and still more on the current which he had observed constantly flowing northwards, past Ujiji, a northerly current which had been observed also by Burton, more especially near Uvira. When, however, Livingstone was made to understand the importance which was attached in England to a search for the outlet, he agreed to accompany Stanley to the canoes were too small to carry the the north end of the lake. On arriving ivory"- cannot be altogether put on one there, they found the shape to be very side. different from what it appears on Speke's map; the north coast running for about fourteen miles nearly west and east, and indented with bays two or three miles deep, which are separated from each other by sandy spits overgrown with cane grass. A stream, the mouth of which was hidden by the grass, to which they were guided by a fishing-canoe, and which they were told was the Rusizé, was found to flow into the lake, and they seem to have at once accepted the conclusion that this was the only opening. The other bays were examined in the most cursory manner, and some ten miles of coast-line in the northeast corner were looked at only from a distance. Cameron's survey of Tanganyika Lake is much more satisfactory. As a naval officer and a trained observer, he had peculiar advantages; and by equipping a couple of boats at Ujiji, and sailing thence round the southern half of the lake, he was enabled to give us a map, which, so far as it goes, is the most perfect thing of the kind which has yet been attempted. His evidence, and more especially when collated with that of Captain Burton, may be regarded as establishing that Tanganyika is, in its origin, a volcanic cleft in the rocks, and not a mere basin of surface drainage, such as the Victoria Nyanza; that it is of great depth; and is surrounded, or nearly surrounded, by precipitous cliffs rather than mountains, of a height reaching up to two or three thousand feet above the water level; and that, in this southern part of the lake, there is no outlet or possibility of an outlet. His evidence is, therefore, peculiarly valuable when he states that about the middle of the western side, opposite to and some sixty miles south of Ujiji, is an outlet, which appears on his map as the Lukuga River, a name that it will probably hold, though he has proposed to call it after the Duchess of Edinburgh the Marie Alexandrovna. The extreme importance of this discovery must be our excuse for pausing a moment on his exact statement. We cannot therefore attach to this search, and the conclusion arrived at, the very great importance which Stanley and Mr. Waller, the editor of Livingstone's "Last Journals," have done. It is far from impossible, or even from improbable, that what appeared to be the end of the lake was but a false coast-line of vegetable growth, similar to what we have already described as choking the Sindi, a growth peculiar to this country, and to which we shall have again to refer. It is thus neither impossible nor improbable that behind a false coast an outlet lay hidden; and there is nothing particularly exceptional in the supposition that the outlet may be in the immediate neighborhood of an inlet. Not to speak of the Albert Nyanza, where the main stream enters and leaves the lake within a short distance, and without even going out of England, we have in Derwentwater a very striking illustration of our meaning. The Greta bursts violently into the lake at the very spot where the Derwent itself sluggishly flows out to Bassenthwaite; and that, too, through a channel which is sometimes so choked with weeds and water grass, that it might easily escape the notice of a care-into a larger river, the Lualaba." In comless observer in a boat on the lake. On the other hand, the evidence which Baker gathered near the north end of the Albert Nyanza as to the existence of a connection between the two lakes, seems to us to be too strong to be easily disposed | of. Sir Samuel Baker is quite competent to cross-examine even such accomplished liars as native Africans; and the very distinct testimony of two merchants that they had formerly travelled from one lake to the other by boats, but had ceased to perform the journey in that way, because About noon, on the 3rd of May, with a strong easterly wind, he arrived at the entrance of the Lukuga, which was found to be "more than a mile across, but closed by a grass-grown sandbank, with the exception of a channel three or four hundred yards wide," which also is partially choked by a sill, over which the depth is but one fathom. The chief of the district adjoining said "that the river was well known to his people, who often travelled for more than a month along its banks, until it fell pany with this chief, Cameron went four or five miles down the river, until further progress was impossible, owing to masses of floating vegetation. "Here the depth was three fathoms; breadth, six hundred yards; current, one knot and a half, and sufficiently strong to drive us well into the edge of the vegetation." There is no doubt whatever that, through this channel, at the time that Mr. Cameron was there, the water was flowing out of the lake. Cameron's nautical training renders it quite impossible that he should be mistaken on such a point. But whether | rent almost imperceptible, and it is diffi this outflow is permanent or not, is a total-cult to observe the flow of the Nile as it ly different question, which unfortunately leaves the Albert Nyanza; so that from has not been answered. In his book, now the sluggishness of the stream no argupublished, Lieutenant Cameron has not ment can fairly be drawn one way or the expressed any doubt on this point, and has other. spoken of the Lukuga as a permanent outflowing stream; but in his earlier letters to the Geographical Society, he did express great doubt, and was inclined "to think that in the dry season, or when the lake is at its lowest level, little or no water leaves it." He had intended to examine the Lukuga more closely. On the 9th of May, 1874, he wrote from Ujiji: "I propose buying three canoes, which will hold all I intend to take, and then, wherever that river goes, D.V., I go too." But six days later he had to write: "I have abandoned the idea of proceeding down the Lukuga, as such a journey would be most expensive, and require a very long time, as cutting the grass for a way would be hard work, and we should most likely require the assistance of the natives, for which one would have to pay heavily." Those who remember the account which Sir Samuel Baker has given of the obstruction which stopped his passage up the Nile, in 1870, or have read Colonel Long's account of how, in 1874, the "putrid mass of vegetable matwas cut through by a battalion of Soudan soldiers, after a sickly and deadly work of three weeks, will the better understand the decisive nature of the obstacle which stopped Cameron. ter If the natives' testimony is to be accepted, the Lukuga, flowing into the Lualaba, is a main branch of that river which, near the sea, we know as the Congo; and one piece of evidence in support of this, one to which perhaps sufficient weight has not been given, is that a Portuguese map, dated 1623, and now in the British Museum, shows one large lakeclearly Nyassa and Tanganyika combined, a pardonable enough mistake with an outlet to the south-east, which we may identify with the Shire, flowing towards the Indian Ocean, and another outlet to the west, shown as a head stream of the Congo. We are perhaps too prone to refuse the very loose testimony of an inexact and unscientific age; but when we bear in mind that seventeen hundred years ago Ptolemy described the Nile as issuing from two lakes lying east and west of each other, lakes which we now know as the Victoria and Albert Nyanzas; and that the old map of two hundred and fifty years ago shows, with fair accuracy, what we know to be the course of the Shire, we cannot but attach some importance to its testimony as regarding the origin of the Congo. But if the Lukuga is to be accepted as a veritable outlet of Tanganyika, does it necessarily follow that there is no outlet to the north, no connection with the Albert Nyanza, the lake so near, and so exactly on the same level? If there is no connection, the correspondence of level is an extraordinary freak of nature; and if there is a connection, then Tanganyika presents to us the very remarkable phenomenon of a lake with two outlets. As a matter of fact, then, the Lukuga was not examined. There is no proof that it is anything more than an overflow into an adjoining swamp; and there is, equally, no proof that it is not a river, and a very important branch of a great river system. Whatever conviction Lieutenant Cameron now has, it is not the result of observation, but is based on native testimony; as such it is, after all, still a matter of opinion; and on that there is little to be said, for mere opinion can never decidely unknown; but this opinion is certainly a point of geography. The sluggishness of the stream might, indeed, seem to be proof that the Lukuga cannot be the outflow of such a body of water; but it is rightly enough answered that the outlet of great lakes is often extremely sluggish. On a smaller scale, we have already referred to the outlet of Derwentwater; and Mr. Clements Markham has instanced two similar cases the Kirkaig and the Inver, on the west coast of Sutherlandshire. The Niagara itself issues from Lake Erie with a cur The opinion held by many geographers is that a lake with two outlets is absolute too sweeping, too comprehensive. There * Colonel Gordon, in his account of the recent survey of the Albert Nyanza, has mentioned an important bifurcation of the Nile, a few miles north of its escape from the lake; and we know of at least one instance which can be examined by any tourist in our own lake country. It is that of the stream which rises between EelCrags and Grasmoor. This for the most part, as the Liza Beck, runs west to join the Cocker and fall into Lowes water; but in wet weather it divides on the shoulder of Grasmoor, and sends off a branch eastwards, which falls into the Coledale Beck, and so into Bassenthwaite. Whilst, then, admitting the great probability of Cameron's Lukuga being really the outlet of Lake Tanganyika, and a head stream of the Congo, we cannot but regret that he was unable to establish it by eye-proof; failing which, we are not prepared to admit the impossibility of a northerly stream to the Albert Nyanza, and the more so, as the latest accounts from Mr. Stanley speak of an extension of that lake to the southward, far beyond what has lately been received on the report of Signor Gessi. We may fairly entertain a hope that Stanley, whose energy has recently done so much for African exploration, has by this time cleared up the question beyond all doubt; but we feel that that cannot be done except by actually passing between the two lakes, down the west side of Tanganyika to the Lukuga, and following it to its junction with the Lualaba, or elsewhere; and when that has been done, the sources of the Nile will be definitely known. As it actually was, the different reports that Mr. Cameron was able to collect led him eventually to think that the Lukuga did flow into the Lualaba; and being unable, by reason of the obstructive growth, to follow it down in canoes, and learning that boats could be got without difficulty at Nyangwé, a position on the Lualaba which Livingstone had already determined, he resolved to make the best of way thither. This he did, and after a journey of rather more than two months, through a country generally marshy, often wooded, sometimes beautiful, occasionally hilly, he arrived there on the third of August, 1874. his Space would fail us to speak at appropriate length of the difficulties of his route, This bifurcation, as well as the second outlet of Lake Masanga, is shown in the map published in the last number of the Proceedings of the Royal Geographical Society, vol. xxi., p. 56. of the misadventures and hardships to which he was subjected, or of the disgusting abominations with which he was made familiar. If we make especial mention of one of these last, it is not so much on account of its horrible nature, as of its peculiarity. In the history of savage life we do not remember any custom at all approaching one which is now recorded of a tribe in Manyuéma, near the River Luama, subject to a chief, Moéné Booté. These people are described as very affectionate among themselves, and decidedly more prolific than any race in that part of the country; but also, as being not only cannibals, but "most filthy cannibals." The horrors of ordinary cannibalism, as exercised on the carcasses of enemies slain in fight, are too familiar to call for remark. They have in them a certain ferocity of hatred that seems not out of place in the savage; neither does the prac tice appear to be opposed to the best traits of savage nature, and is, in fact, in vogue amongst those tribes which in many respects excel in manly dignity and capabil ity of receiving instruction, the Maoris of New Zealand, and the Nyam-nyams, as lately described by Colonel Long. But the abominations habitual to the people of Manyuéma are, we believe and trust, without a parallel on the face of the earth. "Not only," writes Cameron, "do they eat the bodies of enemies killed in battle, but also of people who die of disease. They prepare the corpses by leaving them in running water until they are nearly putrid, and then devour them without any further cooking. They also eat all sorts of carrion, and their odor is very foul and revolting." Assuredly the story of anthropology has disagreeable features from which the study of geography is free. We will endeavor to wash away the foul taint. The very remarkable water system which stretches through some eight degrees of latitude, or about five hundred miles to the south of Nyangwé, has been described at great length in Livingtone's "Last Journals; " and if we are at all to accept the interpretation of it as shown in the map published with them, and referred to Livingstone's own observations, or in the very clear little map by Mr. Turner, of the Royal Geographical Society, which accompanies Commander Cameron's book, Lake Bangwéolo, with a height above sea-level estimated by Livingstone as three thousand six hundred and eightyeight feet, is the real origin of the Congo; although, of course, the remote heads of such streams as the Chambezi would more |