John Hanning Speke
Published: 2017-11-12
Total Pages: 348
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On my arrival in England, the first thing I did was to visit Captain Burton, and obtain an introduction to the Royal Geographical Society, under whose auspices I was about to travel. I next visited the Society, and here was revealed to me, for the first time, the great objects designed for the expedition in question. On the walls of the Society's rooms there hung a large diagram, comprising a section of Eastern Africa, extending from the equator to the fourteenth degree of south latitude, and from Zanzibar sixteen degrees inland, which had been constructed by two reverend gentlemen, Messrs Erhardt and Rebmann, missionaries of the Church Mission Society of London, a short time previously, when carrying on their duties at Zanzibar. In this section-map, swallowing up about half of the whole area of the ground included in it, there figured a lake of such portentous size and such unseemly shape, representing a gigantic slug, or, perhaps, even closer still, the ugly salamander, that everybody who looked at it incredulously laughed and shook his head. It was, indeed, phenomenon enough in these days to excite anybody's curiosity! A single sheet of sweet water, upwards of eight hundred miles long by three hundred broad, quite equal in size to, if not larger than, the great salt Caspian...