Speke and Grant both seem to have taken the shape and existence of the Victoria Nyanza for granted. No doubt from the highlands of Karagwe and Buddu they occasionally caught glimpses of the distant Nyanza; besides which the chiefs and the Arabs spoke of its existence as a fact which could be ascertained by one or two days’ journey to the east. Speke was more concerned himself with losing no time in getting to the point at which the Nile left the Victoria Nyanza. He made little or no attempt to delineate the coast line of that lake with any accuracy, and as we know, he placed the west coast much too far to the east, reducing the lake to almost two-thirds of its actual area. Seeing how near he marched to the coast in Buddu, it is curious that he got no sight of the large archipelago of the Sese Islands,[66] which can be sighted from a distance of many miles. There is no indication of these islands on his map. Apparently he made no attempts to check his computation of the altitude of the Victoria Nyanza, which in 1858 he computed at 3740 feet (an estimate not far off the correct one of 3775 feet). All the other altitudes taken by his boiling-point thermometer seem to be too low. His surmise that the Ripon Falls are only 3308 feet above sea-level is more than four hundred feet too low; and if his altitudes in northern Unyamwezi are correct (which I doubt), the waters of the Victoria Nyanza must be a huge, pent-up dam which would flood large tracts of German East Africa. [Illustration: THE RIPON FALLS FROM THE WEST BANK.] Grant had to be left behind in Karagwe, owing to an ulcerated leg. Speke decided upon going to Uganda alone, but despatched the head-man of his caravan, Baraka, with a companion to the north of Unyoro, providing him with a letter to Petherick. He himself entered Uganda (first of all Europeans to do so) on the 16th of January, 1862. He travelled along the coast country of Buddu, and soon began to appreciate the beauty of the land.