“It will easily be seen shortly how many false hypotheses, how many false reasonings, have been made on the subject; however, there are still people so obstinate of the antiquity, that they will not put faith in those who have been on the spot, and who, having witnessed with their own eyes, could efface what the ancients had written about them. It was difficult and even impossible in following the course of the Nile to go up to its source; those who undertook it were always stopped by the cataracts, and despairing that neither they themselves or others could succeed, they invented a thousand stories. Let us add that neither the Greeks nor the Romans, who are the only ones from whom we have borrowed all our knowledge, have ever carried their arms to that side; who have not even heard spoken of so many barbarous nations who live along this great river; that the land where the Nile springs from, and all those in its environs, are only inhabited by savage and barbarous people; that to arrive there terrible mountains will have to be crossed, impenetrable forests, deserts full of wild beasts, who hardly find there anything to live on. If, however, those who have made so many attempts to discover the source of the Nile had gone though the Red Sea they might with less trouble and expense found what they were looking for.” After hearing what the ancients said and thought of the sources of the Nile, let us see what we are able to gather from the Arabs: The following are extracts from part of a manuscript, in the possession of H. E. Ali Pasha Moubarek, the present Minister of Public Instruction, Egypt. The name of the compiler is not given; only the date, 1098 A.H. = 1686 A.D. They are translated by Mr. Vandyck, teacher of English in the Government Schools, Cairo. “Abu el Fadel, son of Kadama, says in his book, ‘that all rivers in inhabited countries are 228 in number. Some flow like the Nile, from south to north, some flow from east to west, and some flow from north to south, and some flow in more than one of these directions, like the Euphrates and the Gihon.’ He further says, ‘As for the Nile, it starts from the Mountains of Gumr (Kamar) beyond the equator, from a source from which flow ten rivers, every five of these flowing into a separate lake, then from each one of these two lakes two rivers flow out; then all four of these rivers flow into one great lake in the first zone, and from this great lake flows out the Nile.”