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England had never sent an expedition to the Nile sources previous to that under the command of Speke and Grant.
We were kindly offered a house by Monsieur Lombrosio, the manager of the Khartoum branch of the "Oriental and Egyptian Trading Company." I now heard the distressing news of the death of my poor friend Speke. I could not realize the truth of this melancholy report until I read the details of his fatal accident in the appendix of a French translation of his work.
I made each of them a present of a bead necklace, and explained to them my wish that there should be no delay in my presentation to Kamrasi, as Speke had complained that he bad been kept waiting fifteen days before the king had condescended to see him; that, if this occurred, no Englishman would ever visit him, as such a reception would be considered an insult.
When Burton arrived in London on May 21st it was only to find all the ground cut from under him. While Speke, the subordinate, had been welcomed like a king, he, Burton, the chief of the expedition, had landed unnoticed. But the bitterest pill was the news that Speke had been appointed to lead the new expedition.
The messengers of the king received them well and brought them to the court. Rumanika now desired them to remain at his capital until he had sent word before them that the party intended to go to Uganda. Grant, about this time, was laid up with an ulcerated leg; and, when the time came for moving forward, Speke was obliged to set out for Uganda alone, which place he entered on January 16, 1862.
There, too, the waters, impeded by a natural dam, looked like a huge mill-pond, sullen and dark, in which two crocodiles, floating about, were looking out for prey." From the high banks Speke looked down upon a line of sloping wooded islets lying across the stream, which, by dividing its waters, became at once both dam and rapids.
But Trenchard was both an active public servant and an earnest Whig. Even if he had himself been inclined to lenity, he would have been urged to severity by those who surrounded him. He had constantly at his side Hugh Speke and Aaron Smith, men to whom a hunt after a Jacobite was the most exciting of all sports.
The sun had just risen, when the king unceremoniously marched into my hut; he was no longer the dignified monarch of Kitwara clothed in a beautiful mantle of fine skins, but he wore nothing but a short kilt of blue baize that Speke had given him, and a scarf thrown across his shoulders.
I took down my favourite books, kissing each one of them like a sweetheart. Then I read here and there in all of them, observing all the old passages I had marked. I lay in all attitudes. Sprawling on the floor on my back, on my belly ... on my side ... now with my knees crossed.... Whitman, Shakespeare, Scott, Shelley, Byron ... Speke, Burton, Stanley ... my real comrades!... my real world!
"Was this the place where Burton and Speke stood, Bombay, when they saw the lake first?" "I don't remember, master; it was somewhere about here, I think." "Poor fellows! The one was half-paralyzed, the other half-blind," said Sir Roderick Murchison, when he described Burton and Spoke's arrival in view of the Tanganika.
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