But about thirty years ago the modern world was startled and gratified with its first glimpse at the Lake Regions of Africa. In 1849, Livingstone, Oswell and Murray, after weary marching across the Kalihari, or southern, desert, stood on the margin of Lake Ngami, the most southerly and first discovered of the great chain of equatorial lakes. They expected to find only a continuation of desert sands and desert hardships, but, lo! a mighty expanse of waters breaks on their vision, worth more as a discovery than a dozen nameless tribes or rivers. What could it mean? Was this the key to that mysterious outpour of rivers which, flowing north, east, and west, blended their waters with the Mediterranean, the Pacific and Atlantic? The discoverer could go no further then, but fancy was excited with the prospect of vague and limitless possibilities and speculation became active in every scientific centre. Back again into the wilderness the discoverer is drawn, and a score of others plunge into the unknown to share his fame. From the discovery of Ngami, a broad sheet into which the Cubango, south of the Zambesi and parallel with it, expands ere it plunges into the great central Salt Pan (a Great Salt Lake), may be dated the revival of modern curiosity in the secrets of the African Continent. In the Portuguese colonies of Abyssinia, there were rumors that a great lake existed north of the Zambesi, called Maravi or Nyassa. Its outflow was unknown, and the theory was that it was one of a long chain which fed the Nile. They thought no other stream was worthy of such a source, but they did not ask, whence then the mightier volumes that pour through the Congo and Zambesi? Others said the Nile finds ample sources in the “Mountains of the Moon.” Nobody had seen these, but old Ptolemy, the geographer, had said so two thousand years ago, and hundreds of years before, Herodotus had written, in obedience to the dictates of two Egyptian priests, that “two conical hills, Crophi and Mophi, divided the unfathomable waters of the Nile from those which ran into Ethiopia.” This is all the information we had of the sources of the Nile down to 1863——at least of the White, or Eastern, branch of the Nile. Then it was that Speke and Grant, coming from the south, and Baker following the valley of the river toward the equator, almost met on the spot which contains its true sources. Poor Livingstone could not be made to see the merit of their discovery. He clung to the story of Herodotus, amplified by that of Ptolemy, which fixed the head of the great river in two lakes some ten degrees south of the Equator. Livingstone believed that the high water-shed between the Zambesi and Congo would pass for the Mountains of the Moon, and that in the Lualaba, flowing northward (the Lualaba afterwards turned out to be the Congo, as Stanley showed) he had the track of the true Nile. Following this will-o-the-wisp into the swamps of Lake Bangweolo, he met a lonely and lingering death.