It is 600 miles inland from Zanzibar, or the east coast of Africa, and almost in the centre of that wonderful basin whose reservoirs contribute to the Nile, Zambesi and Congo. The route from Zanzibar half way to the lake is a usual one, and we need not describe it. The balance of the way, through the Ugogo and Unyamwezi countries, is surrounded by the richest African verdure and diversified by running streams and granitic slopes, with occasional crags. At length the mountain ranges which surround the lake are reached, and when crossed there appear on the eastern shore the thatched houses of Ujiji, the rendezvous of all expeditions, scientific, commercial and missionary, that have ever reached these mysterious waters. Burton and Speke were the white discoverers of Tanganyika. It seemed to them the revelation of a new world——a sight to make men hold their breath with a rush of new thoughts, as when Bilboa and his men stood silent on that peak in Darien and gazed upon the Pacific Ocean. Fifteen years later Cameron struck it and could not believe that the vast grey expanse was aught else than clouds on the distant mountains of Ugoma, till closer observation proved the contrary. Livingstone struck it from the west side. It was on his last journey through Africa, he had entered upon that journey at Zanzibar, in April 1866, and made for Lake Nyassa and its outlet the Shiré River, both of which have been described in connection with the Zambesi. [Illustration: BURTON AND SPEKE ON TANGANYIKA.] Then began that almost interminable ramble to which he fell a victim. He was full of the theory that no traveller had yet seen the true head waters of the Nile——in other words that neither Victoria nor Albert Nyanza were its ultimate reservoirs, but that they were to be found far below the equator in that bewildering “Lake Region” which never failed to reveal wonderful secrets to such as sought with a patience and persistency like his own. He was supported in this by the myths of the oldest historians, by the earliest guesses which took the shape of maps, by the traditions of the natives that boats had actually passed from Albert Nyanza into Tanganyika, but above all by the delusion that the great river Lualaba, which he afterwards found flowing northward from lakes far to the south of Tanganyika, could not be other than the Nile itself.