ociety's
rooms there hung a large diagram constructed by two missionaries
carrying on their duties at Zanzibar. In this section map, swallowing
up about half of the whole area of the ground included in it, there
figured a lake of such portentous size and such unseemly shape,
representing a gigantic slug, that everybody who looked at it
incredulously laughed and shook his head--a single sheet of sweet
water, upwards of eight hundred miles long by three hundred broad,
equal in size to the great salt Caspian."

It was April 1857 before Burton and Speke had collected an escort and
guides at Zanzibar, the great slave market of East Africa, and were
ready to start for the interior. "We could obtain no useful information
from the European merchants of Zanzibar, who are mostly ignorant of
everything beyond the island," Burke wrote home on 22nd April.

At last on 27th June, with thirty-six men and thirty donkeys, the party
set out for the great malarious coast-belt which had to be crossed
before Kaze, some five hundred miles distant, could be reached. After
three months' arduous travelling--both Burton and Speke were badly
stricken with fever--they reached Kaze. Speke now spread open the map
of the missionaries and inquired of the natives where the enormous
lake was to be found. To their intense surprise they found the
missionaries had run three lakes into one, and the three lakes were
Lake Nyassa, Tanganyika, and Victoria Nyanza. They stayed over a month
at Kaze, till Burton seemed at the point of death, and Speke had him
carried out of the unhealthy town. It was January before they made
a start and continued their journey westward to Ugyi.

"It is a wonderful thing," says Drummond, "to start from the
civilisation of Europe, pass up these mighty rivers, and work your
way alone and on foot, mile after mile, month after month, among strange
birds and beasts and plants and insects, meeting tribes which have
no name, speaking tongues which no man can interpret, till you have
reached its sacred heart and stood where white man has never trod
before."

[Illustration: BURTON IN A DUG-OUT ON LAKE TANGANYIKA. After a drawing
by Burton.]

As the two men tramped on, the streams began to drain to the west and
the land grew more fertile, till one hundred and fifty miles from Kaze
they began to ascend the slope of mountains overhanging the northern
half of Lake Tanganyika. "This mountain mass," says Speke, "I consider
to be the True Mo