Page:Works of Jules Verne - Parke - Vol 1.djvu/231

 and wretchedness. But the presence of a Christian in the town could not be tolerated longer, and the Foullaunes threatened to beset him.

So the doctor departed on the I7th March, 1854, and sought refuge on the frontier, where he remained thirty-three days in terrible destitution. He returned to Kano in November, and thence to Kouka. Here he struck the former route of Denham, after four months' detention. About the end of the year 1855 he got back to Tripoli, and reached London on the 6th September, the sole survivor of his party. Such was the extraordinary journey of Barth.

Doctor Ferguson had noted carefully that Barth did not penetrate beyond 4° N. lat. and 17° W. long.

Now let us see what Burton and Speke accomplished in Eastern Africa.

The various expeditions which ascended the Nile were all unable to reach its source, apparently shrouded in mystery. According to the account of the German doctor, Ferdinand Werne, the expedition projected in 1840, under the auspices of Mehamet Ali, was stopped at Gondokoro between the 4th and 5th parallels of N. lat.

In 1855 Brun-Rollet, a Savoyard, Sardinian consul in the Soudan in the place of Vauday, who had been killed, quitted Karthoum, and, in the disguise of a merchant dealing in gum and ivory, he reached Belenia just beyond 4°, and returned to Karthoum sick. He died there in 1857.

Neither Doctor Beney, chief of the Egyptian Medical Service, who in a small steamer reached to one degree below Gondokoro, and returned to die of exhaustion at Karthoum; nor the Venetian Miani, who, by avoiding the cataracts below Gondokoro, touched the second parallel; nor the Maltese merchant, Andrea Debono, who pushed on farther still, was able to pass that insurmountable barrier.

In 1859, M. Guillaume Lejean, sent out by the French Government, reached Karthoum by way of the Red Sea, and embarked on the Nile with a crew of twenty-one men and twenty soldiers, but he could not get beyond Gondokoro, and incurred the greatest danger from the negro tribes, then in full revolt. The expedition under the direction of M. Escayrac de Lauture made an equally vain attempt to reach these famous sources.

That fatal barrier always stopped would-be explorers.