They only placed
its source further south, and surrounded it with greater marvels.
They told how, by going up the stream, sailors at length reached an
undetermined country, a kind of borderland between this world and the
next, a "Land of Shades," whose inhabitants were dwarfs, monsters,
or spirits. Thence they passed into a sea sprinkled with mysterious
islands, like those enchanted archipelagoes which Portuguese and Breton
mariners were wont to see at times when on their voyages, and which
vanished at their approach. These islands were inhabited by serpents
with human voices, sometimes friendly and sometimes cruel to the
shipwrecked. He who went forth from the islands could never more
re-enter them: they were resolved into the waters and lost within the
bosom of the waves. A modern geographer can hardly comprehend such
fancies; those of Greek and Roman times were perfectly familiar with
them. They believed that the Nile communicated with the Red Sea near
Suakin, by means of the Astaboras, and this was certainly the route
which the Egyptians of old had imagined for their navigators. The
supposed communication was gradually transferred farther and farther
south; and we have only to glance over certain maps of the sixteenth
and seventeenth centuries, to see clearly drawn what the Egyptians had
imagined--the centre of Africa as a great lake, whence issued the Congo,
the Zambesi, and the Nile. Arab merchants of the Middle Ages believed
that a resolute man could pass from Alexandria or Cairo to the land of
the Zindjes and the Indian Ocean by rising from river to river.[*]

* Joinville has given a special chapter to the description
of the sources and wonders of the Nile, in which he believed
as firmly as in an article of his creed. As late as the
beginning of the seventeenth century, Wendelinus devoted
part of his _Admiranda Nili_ to proving that the river did
not rise in the earthly Paradise. At Gurnah, forty years
ago, Rhind picked up a legend which stated that the Nile
flows down from the sky.

[Illustration: 027.jpg SOUTH AFRICA AND THE SOURCES OF THE NILE, BY
ODOAKDO LOPEZ. 1]

1 Facsimile of the map published by Kircher in _OEdipus
AEgyptiacus_, vol. i. (_Iconismus II_), p. 53.

Many of the legends relating to this subject are lost, while others
have been collected and embellished with fresh features by Jewish and
Christian theologians. The Nile was said to have its