Zanzibar - 1872 Author:Richard Francis Burton Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III. HOW THE NILE QUESTION STOOD IN THE TEAK OF GRACE 1856. This is the finial of th' encircling earth. Soph. Phil. In this chapter I propose... more » 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 Sawdhil, 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.1 As the pages of Marco Polo show, not to quote the voyage of ' Sinhad 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 appliedto that eminent Sanskritist the Rev. J. Wilson, D.D., for any notices...« less