But there is a much graver objection to the Zanzibar route to the interior. Stanley started by this route on his search for Livingstone, two white men with him; he came back without them. Cameron set out by the same path to cross Africa with two companions; before he got to Tanganyika he was alone. The Geographical Society's late expedition, under Mr. Keith Johnstone, started from Zanzibar with two Europeans; the hardy and accomplished leader fell within a couple of months. These expeditions have all gone into the interior by this one fatal way, and probably every second man, by fever or by accident, has left his bones to bleach along the road. Hitherto there has been no help for it. The great malarious coast-belt must be crossed, and one had simply to take his life in his hands and go through with it. But now there is an alternative. There is a rival route into the interior, which, though it is not without its dark places too, will probably yet become the great highway from the East to Central Africa. Let me briefly sketch it: Africa, speaking generally, is a vast, ill-formed triangle. It has no peninsulas; it has almost no islands or bays or fjords. But three great inlets, three mighty rivers piercing it to the very heart, have been allocated by a kind Nature, one to each of its solid sides. On the north is the river of the past, flowing through Egypt, as Leigh Hunt says, "like some grave, mighty thought threading a dream"; on the west, the river of the future, the not less mysterious Congo; and on the east the little known Zambesi. The physical features of this great continent are easily grasped. From the coast a low scorched plain, reeking with malaria, extends inland in unbroken monotony for two or three hundred miles. This is succeeded by mountains slowly rising into a plateau some 2000 or 3000 feet high; and this, at some hundreds of miles distance, forms the pedestal for a second plateau, as high again. This last plateau, 4000 to 5000 feet high, may be said to occupy the whole of Central Africa. It is only on the large scale, however, that these are to be reckoned plateaux at all. When one is upon them he sees nothing but mountains and valleys and plains of the ordinary type, covered for the most part with forest.