had come up with
three vessels fully equipped with armed men, camels, horses, donkeys,
and everything necessary for a long journey, expressly to look after
us. Three Dutch ladies also, with a view to assist us (God bless them!),
had come here in a steamer, but were driven back to Khartum by sickness.
Nobody had dreamt for a moment it was possible we could come through."

Leaving Baker to continue his way to central Africa, Speke and Grant
made their way home to England, where they arrived in safety after
an absence of three years and fifty-one days, with their great news
of the discovery of Uganda and their further exploration of Victoria
Nyanza. When Speke reached Alexandria he had telegraphed home: "The
Nile is settled." But he was wrong. The Nile was not settled, and many
an expedition was yet to make its way to the great lakes before the
problem was to be solved.

CHAPTER LXVI

BAKER FINDS ALBERT NYANZA

Baker had not been long at Gondokoro when the two English explorers
arrived from the south.

"In March 1861," he tells us, "I commenced an expedition to discover
the sources of the Nile, with the hope of meeting the East African
expedition of Captains Speke and Grant that had been sent by the English
Government from the south _via_ Zanzibar for that object. From my youth
I had been innured to hardship and endurance in tropical climates,
and when I gazed upon the map of Africa I had a wild hope that I might
by perseverance reach the heart of Africa."

These are the opening lines of the published travels of Samuel Baker,
famous as an elephant-hunter in Ceylon and engineer of the first
railway laid down in Turkey. Like Livingstone, in his early
explorations, Baker took his wife with him. "It was in vain that I
implored her to remain, and that I painted the difficulties and perils
still blacker than I supposed they really would be; she was resolved
to share all dangers and to follow me through each rough footstep of
the wild life before me."

On 15th April 1861, Baker and his wife left Cairo to make their way
southward to join the quest for the source of the Nile. They reached
Korosko in twenty-six days, and crossed the Nubian desert on camels,
a "very wilderness of scorching sand, the simoon in full force and
the thermometer in the shade standing at 114 degrees Fahr." By Abu
Hamed and Berber they reached Atbara. It now occurred to Baker that
without some knowledge of Arabic he could do little in the w