The Albert NYanza, Great Basin of the Nile | Page 9

earliest history; and although
changed in special importance, they preserve their geographical
significance to the present day.
The power and intelligence of man will have their highest development
within certain latitudes, and the natural passions and characters of races
will be governed by locality and the temperature of climate.
There are certain attractions in localities that induce first settlements of
man; even as peculiar conditions of country attract both birds and

animals. The first want of man and beast is food: thus fertile soil and
abundant pasture, combined with good climate and water
communication, always ensure the settlement of man; while natural
seed-bearing grasses, forests, and prairies attract both birds and beasts.
The earth offers special advantages in various positions to both man
and beast; and such localities are, with few exceptions, naturally
inhabited. From the earliest creation there have been spots so peculiarly
favoured by nature, by geographical position, climate, and fertility, that
man has striven for their occupation, and they have become scenes of
contention for possession. Such countries have had a powerful
influence in the world's history, and such will be the great pulses of
civilization,--the sources from which in a future, however distant, will
flow the civilization of the world. Egypt is the land whose peculiar
capabilities have thus attracted the desires of conquest, and with whom
the world's earliest history is intimately connected.
Egypt has been an extraordinary instance of the actual formation of a
country by alluvial deposit; it has been CREATED by a single river.
The great Sahara, that frightful desert of interminable scorching sand,
stretching from the Red Sea to the Atlantic, is cleft by one solitary
thread of water. Ages before man could have existed in that
inhospitable land, that thread of water was at its silent work: through
countless years it flooded and fell, depositing a rich legacy of soil upon
the barren sand until the delta was created; and man, at so remote a
period that we have no clue to an approximate date, occupied the fertile
soil thus born of the river Nile, and that corner of savage Africa,
rescued from its barrenness, became Egypt, and took the first rank in
the earth's history.
For that extraordinary land the world has ever contended, and will yet
contend.
From the Persian conquest to the present day, although the scene of
continual strife, Egypt has been an example of almost uninterrupted
productiveness. Its geographical position afforded peculiar advantages
for commercial enterprise. Bounded on the east by the Red Sea, on the
north by the Mediterranean, while the fertilizing Nile afforded inland
communication, Egypt became the most prosperous and civilized
country of the earth. Egypt was not only created by the Nile, but the
very existence of its inhabitants depended upon the annual inundation

of that river: thus all that related to the Nile was of vital importance to
the people; it was the hand that fed them.
Egypt depending so entirely upon the river, it was natural that the
origin of those mysterious waters should have absorbed the attention of
thinking men. It was unlike all other rivers. In July and August, when
European streams were at their lowest in the summer heat, the Nile was
at the flood! In Egypt there was no rainfall--not even a drop of dew in
those parched deserts through which, for 860 miles of latitude, the
glorious river flowed without a tributary. Licked up by the burning sun,
and gulped by the exhausting sand of Nubian deserts, supporting all
losses by evaporation and absorption, the noble flood shed its annual
blessings upon Egypt. An anomaly among rivers; flooding in the driest
season; everlasting in sandy deserts; where was its hidden origin?
where were the sources of the Nile?
This was from the earliest period the great geographical question to be
solved.
In the advanced stage of civilization of the present era, we look with
regret at the possession by the Moslem of the fairest portions of the
world,--of countries so favoured by climate and by geographical
position, that, in the early days of the earth's history, they were the
spots most coveted; and that such favoured places should, through the
Moslem rule, be barred from the advancement that has attended lands
less adapted by nature for development. There are no countries of the
earth so valuable, or that would occupy so important a position in the
family of nations, as Turkey in Europe, Asia Minor, and Egypt, under a
civilized and Christian government.
As the great highway to India, Egypt is the most interesting country to
the English. The extraordinary fertility being due entirely to the Nile, I
trust that I may have added my mite to the treasury of scientific
knowledge by completing the discovery of the sources of that
wonderful river, and thereby to