Page:Africa by Élisée Reclus, Volume 3.djvu/470

 also navigable by small craft. Of the two the Komo is the larger, rising like the Muni in the upland valleys of the Crystal Range.

Some 60 miles south-west of the Gaboon estuary, the sea is reached by the Ogoway, largest of all the rivers between the Niger and Congo, and like the Gaboon at first supposed to be also one of the great continental watercourses. Even after Livingstone's discovery of the Lua-Laba, by him wrongly supposed to be the Upper Nile, many geographers fancied that this emissary of the great Cazembe lakes might trend westwards to the Ogoway, and it was this theory that gave occasion to the expeditions of Oscar Lenz and of other explorers in this

region. But although occupying a much humbler position than had been supposed, the Ogoway still sends down a greater volume than either the Rhine or the Rhone, or any other river in the west of Europe. At the same time the estimates of 1,580,000 or 1,760,000 cubic feet per second during the floods are probably exaggerated; and allowing even that four-fifths of the rain falling within its basin of 120,000 square miles ultimately reaches the sea, the mean discharge cannot greatly exceed 350,000 cubic feet per second.

The farthest headstreams of the Ogoway, which has a total course of about 720 miles, rise in the Ba-Teke territory, within 120 miles west of the Congo. After its junction with the Passa, the main stream, already navigable for boats, at