Katonga, and generally called tlie Usoga River, because
it waters tbat district. Although he had recently
visited Kibuga, and had lived with Sultan Mtésa,
the présent reigning monarch in place of Sunna, who
died since Snay was there, he had no positive or definite
idea of the physical features of any of the country
beyond the point which he had reached ; but he produced
a negro slave who had been to Usoga, and had
seen the river in question. This man called the river
Kivira, and described it as being much broader, deeper,
and stronger in its current than either the Katonga or
Kitangulé river ; that it came from the lake, and that
it intersected stony hilly ground on its passage to the
north-west.
This river Kivira, I now believe (although I must
confess I did not until I made Snay alter his original
statement about the direction of its flow, and so proved
he meant this for his Jub), is the Nile itself. On a
subsequent occasion, when talking to a very respectable
Suahili merchant, by name Sheikh Abdullah bin
Nasib, about the N’yanza, he corroborated the story
about the mariners, who are said to keep logs and use
sextants, and mentioned that he had heard of the Kidi
and Bari people living on the Kivira river. Now,
the Bari people mentioned by him are evidently those
who have long since been known to us as a tribe
living on the Nile in latitude 5° north and longitude
32° east, and described by the different Egyptian expeditions
sent up the Nile to discover its source. M.
Ferdinand Weme (says Dr Beke) has published an
account of the second expedition’s proceedings, in
which he took p a r t; and which, it appears, succeeded
in getting farther up the river than either of the others.
The author states that, according to Lacono, King of
Bari, the course of the river continues thence southwards
a distance of thirty days’ journey.” This, by
Dr Beke’s computation, places the source of the Nile
just where I have since discovered the N’yanza’s southern
extremity to be—in the second degree south latitude,
lying in the Unyamudzi country.*
Here we see how singularly all the different informers
statements blend together in substantiating my
opinion that the N’yanza is the great reservoir or foun-
tainhead of that mighty stream that floated Father
Moses on his first adventurous sail — the Nile. I t
must appear marvellous to the English reader how it
happened that these traders obtained so much and such
good information to the northward of the equator, and
especially of the White Nile traders. The reason! are
these :—For several years these Arabs have not only
traded with Karague, Uganda, and Usoga, but they
have had trading-stations in Uddu-Uganda and in
Karagud The Uganda station has since been broken
up by order of the king, as the Arabs were interfering
too much with his subjects. In Karagub, on the
contrary, they still have establishments; and as they
cannot go into Unyoro themselves, they have induced
the Wahaiya and Waziwa to bring them ivory from
that country and from Kidi, in exchange for which
* See Dr Beke’s paper on ‘ The Sources of the Nile,’ printed 1849.