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In several places the clear channels were less than 150 yards wide. As the steamers made southing, the river became narrower and the obstacles to navigation more serious floating islands of weeds and banked sudd blocking the fairway, leaving it but 50 yards or less in width. It is about 62 miles from Fashoda to the Sobat river, that Abyssinian tributary to the Nile.
The strange sail now reported was rapidly approaching on her route to Khartoum, without the slightest suspicion that a large military station was established within four miles of the Sobat junction. If guilty, she was thus approaching the jaws of the lion. As she neared the station, she must have discovered the long row of masts and yards of the fleet moored alongside the quay.
Constantly falling victims to the cruelty of the slave-hunters, it is no wonder that they regard with suspicion, and too often treat with ferocity, the strangers who traverse their land; not unnaturally they implicate them in the traffic which crushes them to the ground. Alexina Tinné reached at length the junction of the Sobat with the Nile.
I knew that the Sirdar intended sending a force upon the gunboats up the White Nile to Fashoda and Sobat, so I made both verbal and written requests to the General for permission to accompany the expedition. That, I was told, could not be granted.
As the Khedive's expedition under Colonel Gordon will shortly have the advantage of a steamer on the Albert Lake or M'wootan N'zige, the question of a connection between the two lakes will be definitely settled. When that question shall have been resolved, geographers must turn their attention to the great river Sobat, which is by far the most important affluent of the Nile.
The water of the Sobat is yellowish, and it colours that of the White Nile for a great distance. By dead reckoning I made the Sobat junction 684 miles by river from Khartoum. When I saw the Sobat, in the first week of January 1863, it was bank-full. The current is very powerful, and when I sounded in various places during my former voyage, I found a depth of twenty-six to twenty-eight feet.
The banks were very abrupt and about fifteen feet deep, the bed between forty and fifty yards wide; thus a considerable volume of water is carried down to the river Sobat by this river during the rains. The whole drainage of the country, tends to the east, and accordingly flows into the Sobat.
At three o'clock on the same afternoon the Sirdar and the gunboats resumed their journey to the south, and the next day reached the mouth of the Sobat, sixty-two miles from Fashoda. Here other flags were hoisted and another post formed with a garrison of half the XIIIth Soudanese battalion and the remaining two guns of Peake's battery.
At 2.40 P.M. we passed the second of the three noggurs that sailed yesterday, and at 3 P.M. we passed the third exactly at the Giraffe junction. We have thus been six hours and twenty-five minutes from the Sobat to the Giraffe junction. Thermometer, 6 A.M., 66 degrees; noon, 86 degrees. "January 3.
Next to be treated of is the famous Blue Nile, which we found a miserable river, even when compared with the Geraffe branch of the Sobat. It is very broad at the mouth, it is true, but so shallow that our vessel with difficulty was able to come up it. It has all the appearance of a mountain stream, subject to great periodical fluctuations.
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