Abstract
THE Times Berlin correspondent furnishes some interesting notes of Dr. Baumann's recent journeys in the region of the Nile sources, which confirm Mr. Stanley's identification of the Mountains of the Moon. In Urundi the kings were supposed to be lineal descendants of the moon, and the white traveller was hailed as being the returned ghost of a lately-deceased chief. On September 11 the expedition crossed the Akenyaru, which is not, as supposed, a lake, but a river, though the name “Nyanza” is often applied to it. Dr. Baumann also discovered that the so-called Lake Mworengo is in reality a river which flows into the Akenyaru, and came to the conclusion that there was no extensive sheet of water in Ruanda or North Urundi. On September 19 Dr. Baumann arrived at the source of the Kagera (Alexandra Nile), which rises at the foot of the precipitous and wooded hills which form the watershed between the basins of Rufizi and the Kagera. This mountain chain is known to the natives by the name of the “Mountains of the Moon,” and is held in peculiar reverence by them. Here Dr. Baumann maintains the real source of the Nile to be, for if “it be acknowledged that the Kagera is the chief feeder of the Victoria. Nyanza, it follows that the headwaters of the Nile can be none other than those of the Kagera itself in the Mountains of the Moon in Urundi, within the boundaries of German East Africa.”
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Geographical Notes. Nature 47, 377 (1893). https://doi.org/10.1038/047377a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/047377a0