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A good many years ago I spent a winter in Africa. I had intended to go up the Nile only as far as Nubia, visiting the great temples and tombs of Thebes on the way; but when I had done all this, and passed beyond the cataracts at the southern boundary of Egypt, I found the journey so agreeable, so full of interest, and attended with so much less danger than I had supposed, that I determined to go on for a month or two longer, and penetrate as far as possible into the interior. Everything was favorable to my plan. I crossed the great Nubian Desert without accident or adventure, reached the ancient region of Ethiopia, and continued my journey until I had advanced beyond all the cataracts of the Nile, to the point where the two great branches of the river flow together.

This point, which you will find on your maps in the country called Sennaar, bordering Abyssinia on the northwestern side, has become very important within the last twenty or thirty years. The Egyptians, after conquering the country, established there their seat of government for all that part of Africa, and very soon a large and busy town arose where formerly there had only been a few mud huts of the natives. The town is called Khartoum, and I suppose it must contain, by this time, forty or fifty thousand inhabitants. It is built on a sandy plain, studded here and there with clumps of thorny trees. On the east side the Blue Nile, the source of which was discovered by the Scotch traveller, Bruce, in the last century, comes down clear and swift from the mountains of Abyssinia; on the west, the broad, shallow, muddy current of the White Nile, which rises in the great lakes discovered by Speke and Baker within the last twenty years, makes its appearance. The two rivers meet just below the town, and flow as a single stream to the Mediterranean, a distance of fifteen hundred miles.