“The length of this lake is, at a very moderate estimate, 150 miles. It gives forth a large body of water in the Luapula; yet lakes are in no sense sources for no large river begins in a lake; but this and others serve an important purpose in the phenomena of the Nile. It is one large lake, and, unlike the Okara, which, according to Suaheli, who travelled long in our company, is three or four lakes run into one huge Victoria Nianza, gives out a large river which, on departing out of Moero, is still larger. These men had spent many years east of Okara, and could scarcely be mistaken in saying that of the three or four lakes there only one (the Okara) gives off its waters to the north. The ‘White Nile’ of Speke, less by a full half than the Shire out of Nyassa (for it is only eighty or ninety yards broad), can scarcely be named in comparison with the central or Webb’s Lualaba, of from two thousand to six thousand yards, in relation to the phenomena of the Nile. The structure and economy of the watershed answer very much the same end as the great lacustrine rivers, but I cannot at present copy a lost despatch which explained that. The mountains on the watershed are probably what Ptolemy, for reasons now unknown, called the Mountains of the Moon. From their bases I found that the springs of the Nile do unquestionably arise. This is just what Ptolemy put down, and is true geography. We must accept the fountains, and nobody but Philistines will reject the mountains, though we cannot conjecture the reason for the name. “Before leaving the subject of the watershed, I may add that I know about six hundred miles of it, but am not yet satisfied, for unfortunately the seventh hundred is the most interesting of the whole. I have a very strong impression that in the last hundred miles the fountains of the Nile, mentioned to Herodotus by the Secretary of Minerva in the city of Sais do arise, not like all the rest, from oozing earthen sponges, but from an earthen mound, and half the water flows northward to Egypt, the other half south to Inner Ethiopia. These fountains, at no great distance off, become large rivers, though at the mound they are not more than ten miles apart. That is, one fountain rising on the northeast of the mound becomes Bartle Frere’s Lualaba, and it flows into one of the lakes proper, Kamolondo, of the central line of drainage; Webb’s Lualaba, the second fountain rising on the Northwest, becomes (Sir Paraffin) Young’s Lualaba, which passing through Lake Lincoln and becoming Loeki or Lomame, and joining the central line too, goes north to Egypt. The third fountain on the southwest, Palmerston’s, becomes the Liambia or Upper Zambesi; while the fourth, Oswell’s fountain, becomes the Kafue, and falls into Zambesi in Inner Ethiopia.