Yet we read of the ‘great river Matoney,’ and of ‘travellers crossing the great River Mtony.’ Mto, in the language of Zanzibar, is a river or a rivulet; also a pillow. The Quilimani River signifies simply kilima-ni, (water) from the mountain. The meaning of Quilimansi (the Obi—Webbe—Nile of Makdishu, Webbe Shebayli, of late christened the Haines River, and called Quilimancy by De Barros, from a settlement now unknown) is still under dispute. It cannot grammatically be made to mean ‘mountain-stream, or a mountain with streams,’ as Dr Krapf has it. CHAPTER III. HOW THE NILE QUESTION STOOD IN THE YEAR OF GRACE 1856. Αὐτὴ μεν ἤδε τῆς περιῤῥύτου χθονος. This is the finial of th’ encircling earth. SOPH. PHIL. In this chapter I propose briefly to place before the reader the various shiftings of opinion touching the Nile Sources, and especially to show what had been done for Zanzibar and her coast by the theoretical and practical men of Europe between A.D. 1825 and the time of our landing on the Sawáhil, or East African shores. The details given to Marinus of Tyre by the Arabian merchants, and their verification by the obscure Diogenes, together with the notices of the African lakes on the lower part of the Upper Nile, brought home about A.D. 60 by Nero’s exploring Centurions, were never wholly forgotten by Europe, which thus unlearned to derive with Herodotus the Nile from Western Africa.[12] As the pages of Marco Polo show, not to quote the voyage of ‘Sinbad the Sailor,’ Arabs and Persians still frequented these shores; and the Hindu Banyans, established from time immemorial upon the Zanzibar coast, had diffused throughout India some information touching the wealthy land. The veteran geographer of Africa, Mr James Macqueen, has commented upon the curious fact that the Padmavan of Lieut. Francis Wilford (vol. iii. of the old Asiatic Researches, ‘Course of the River Cali,’ as supposed to be derived from the Puranas) is represented by the beds of floating water-lilies crossed by Captains Speke and Grant, and upon the resemblance between the Amara, or Lake of the Gods, with the Amara people on the N. E. of the so-called Nyanza Lake. These, however, appear to be mere coincidences, or at best the results of tales learned upon the coast by the Hindu trader. Before leaving Bombay I applied to that eminent Sanskritist the Rev. J. Wilson, D.D., for any notices of East Africa which might occur in the sacred writings of the Hindus. He replied that there were none; and I had long before learned that Col. Wilford himself had acknowledged his pandit to have been an impudent impostor.