Page:Littell's Living Age - Volume 125.djvu/85

Rh drugs are entirely neglected. Above Fashoda one great difficulty of the White Nile began. They had passed the mouth of the Giraffe River, one of the affluents or channels of the White Nile to the east, when on February 6th Dr. Schweinfurth saw his first papyrus, an event which to him, botanist as he was, "elevated the day into a festival." On the same day he met for the first time a man to whom he was indebted more than anyone else for his African discoveries; this was a Nubian, Mohammed Aboo Sammat by name, an ivory-trader bound up the Gazelle, who now joined Ghattas' expedition with a single boat. But though the first papyrus was a botanical festival to Schweinfurth it was the beginning of trouble to the sailors and traders, and to them was anything but a festival, marking as it did the commencement of those obstructions to Nile-navigation which both before and after Schweinfurth's journey have been so terrible to travellers. From whatever reason all the streams and channels of the Nile regions have been of late years periodically blocked by great rafts of river weeds, which so overgrow the stream that it dwindles away to the depth of a foot or two. Between these enormous rafts, which every year shift their position, there are lakes or oases of water, in which it is dammed up, until even on the main stream of the White Nile, as in Baker's expedition in 1870-71, no practicable channel was to be found, and he had to return foiled for a while, till at the end of the year he broke through these gigantic grass barriers, called by Schweinfurth the Sett, by almost superhuman exertions in which the combined efforts of his army were strained to the uttermost. Our naturalist's expedition was not foiled, and it did not find the Sett so terrible, but it was bad enough. "On February 8th," he writes, "began our actual conflict with this world of weeds. … The pilots were soon absolutely at a loss to determine by which channel they ought to proceed, and two hundred of our people, sailors and soldiers, were obliged to tug with ropes for hours together to pull through one boat after another." In this laborious fashion they toiled on for several days, and it was only by one of the side channels, called by the sailors, Maia Signora, because it was said to have been discovered in 1863 by the unfortunate Miss Tinné, that the expedition at last reached the mouth of the Gazelle River, which runs into the White Nile from the west. For this river and its affluents Schweinfurth takes up the cudgels against Speke, who in 1863 called it an "unimportant branch;" nor is he quite satisfied with Baker, who "has spoken of its magnitude with great depreciation." For ourselves on this occasion we are Gallios, and care little whether the Blue Nile of Bruce, or the White Nile, or the Gazelle, or the Djoor, are the main stream; and we think Ismael Pacha was quite right when he said that "every fresh African traveller had his own private sources of the Nile." Dr. Schweinfurth, even while asserting the magnitude of the Gazelle, is not at all ashamed to confess that he has not found the sources of the Nile, and on ground where doctors differ we are afraid to tread.

More to our present purpose is the fact that after reaching the mouth of the Gazelle the difficulties of the grass barrier gradually ceased. The boats proceeded prosperously along the Gazelle till they reached the Meshera or "Landing-Place" par excellence, a settlement on an island amidst swamps and marshes about sixteen miles above the confluence of the Djoor River, another of those perplexing affluents, with the Gazelle. On this pestilential island, which had already proved fatal to many European explorers, Schweinfurth was doomed to spend the rest of February and the greater part of March waiting for the native bearers; who were to carry him and his effects to the chief seriba of Ghattas. It could not have added to his spirits to reflect that here amid these swamps had perished in 1863 no less than five out of nine European members of Miss Tinné's expedition, among whom was the German botanist Dr. Steudner; here too, just before Schweinfurth's arrival, had perished Le Saint, a naval officer sent out by the French Geographical Society; and here Heuglin had lost the greater part; of his valuable time by continual relapses of fever. But there was a cheeriness of nature and an activity and energy of disposition in Schweinfurth which sustained his spirits. Instead of fretting, at the delay he was indefatigable in investigating the ethnology and natural features of the country round the Meshera, which is inhabited by a branch of the great Dinka race, whose extreme outposts extend eastward towards the Egyptian borders, of Upper Sennaar and whose tribes are counted by the hundred. While our traveller was there in 1869, the Dinkas round the Meshera acknowledged the supremacy of a woman called Shol, a sort of 