The two greatest African rivers, the Nile and the Niger, are dissimilar in almost every circumstance; the Nile, discharging for ages into a sea, the centre of commerce and civilization, has been renowned by the earliest historians, sacred and profane, for the exuberant fertility of its banks, and for the learning and wisdom of their inhabitants, who have left magnificent and imperishable monuments of their genius and power. Egypt was for ages the seat of science, and by the Red Sea it had intercourse with the most highly cultivated nations of the east from time immemorial. The Niger, on the contrary, though its rival in magnitude, and running through a country glowing with all the brilliancy of tropical vegetation, has ever been inhabited by barbarous or semi-barbarous nations; and its course till lately was little known, as its source still is. In early ages, before the Pillars of Hercules had been passed, and indeed long afterwards, the Atlantic coast of Africa was an unknown region, and thus the flowing of the Niger into that lonely ocean kept the natives in their original rude state. Such are the effects of local circumstances on the intellectual advancement of man. The sources of the Niger, Joliba, or Quorra, are supposed to be on the northern side of the Kong Mountains, in the country of Bambarra, more than 1600 feet above the level of the sea. From thence it runs north, and, after passing through Lake Debo, makes a wide circuit in the plains of Soudan to Timbuctoo through eight or nine degrees of latitude: then bending round, it again approaches the Kong Mountains, at the distance 1000 miles in a straight line from its source; and having threaded them, it flows across the low lands into the Gulf of Guinea, a course of 2300 miles. In the plains of Soudan it receives many very large affluents from the high land of Senegambia on the west, and the Tchadda on the east—a navigable river larger than itself, probably the outlet of the great lake Tchad, which drains the high land of Komri, designated by the ancients as the Mountains of the Moon, and falls into it a little below Fundah, after a course of some hundred miles: thus, the Niger probably affords an uninterrupted water-communication from the Atlantic to the heart of Africa.[120] Long before leaving the plains of Soudan it becomes a noble river with a smooth stream, gliding at the rate of from 5 to 8 miles an hour, varying in breadth from 1 to 8 miles. Its banks are studded with densely populous towns and villages, groves of palm-trees, and cultivated fields.