Finally, I read with regret such statements as the following, made by so well-known a geographer as yourself:  “Speke’s views have been splendidly confirmed; the attacks of his opponents, especially of Burton, who was most inimically inclined to him, collapse into nothing.”  This unwarrantable style of assertion might be expected from the “Mittheilungen,” but it is not honourable to a man of science.  There are, you well know, three main points of difference between the late Captain Speke and myself.  The first is the horse-shoe of mountains blocking up the northern end of the Tanganyika; this, after a dozen years, I succeeded in abolishing.  The second is the existence of the Victoria Nyanza, which I assert to be a lake region, not a lake; it is far from being a “point of detail,” and I hope presently to see it follow the way of the horse-shoe.  Thirdly is the drainage of the Tanganyika, which Captain Speke threw southward to the Zambeze, a theory now universally abandoned.  This may be your view of “splendid confirmation”—­I venture to think that it will not be accepted by the geographical world.

Chapter XI.

Life at Banza Nokki.

I was now duly established with my books and instruments at Nkaye, and the inevitable delay was employed in studying the country and the people, and in making a botanical collection.  But the season was wholly unpropitious.  A naval officer, who was considered an authority upon the Coast, had advised me to travel in September, when a journey should never begin later than May.  The vegetation was feeling the effect of the Cacimbo; most of the perennials were in seed, and the annuals were nearly dried up.  The pictorial effects were those of

“Autumn laying here and there
A fiery finger on the leaves.”

Yet, with Factotum Selim’s assistance, I managed to collect some 490 specimens within the fortnight.  We had not the good fortune of the late Dr. Welwitsch (Welwitschia mirabilis), but there is still a copious treasure left for those who visit the Congo River in the right season.

I was delighted with the country, a counterpart of the Usumbara Hills in Eastern Africa, disposed upon nearly the same parallel.  The Cacimbo season corresponded with the Harmattan north of the Line; still, grey mornings, and covered, rainless noons, so distasteful to the Expedition, which complained that, from four to five days together, it could not obtain an altitude.  The curious contrast in a region of evergreens was not wanting, the varied tintage of winter on one tree, and upon another the brightest hues of budding spring.  The fair land of grass and flowers “rough but beautiful,” of shrubbery-path, and dense mottes or copse islets, with clear fountains bubbling from the rocks, adorned by noble glimpses of the lake-like river, and of a blue horizon, which suggested the ocean—­ever one of the most attractive points in an African landscape,—­was easily invested by the eye of fancy with gold and emerald and steely azure from above, whilst the blue masses of bare mountain, thrown against a cloudless sky, towered over the black-green sea of vegetation at their base, like icebergs rising from the bosom of the Atlantic.