Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
over the origins of this magnificent river since before recorded history began, and perhaps
this was not the right moment to try to settle it once and for all.
'Here,' said Amani, 'I hope you are not disappointed . . .'
At Amani's side, we stopped. Despite the tourist trail, the tiny spring below us was every
bit as insignificant and natural as I had hoped. A hole in the rock sprouted a trickle of wa-
ter so pure it glistened in the mist. Dropping to my knees, I took an army-issue metal mug
from my rucksack and dipped it into the water. It tasted cold and sweet, and would live
forever afterwards on the tip of my tongue.
'Not disappointed at all,' I said, and offered the mug to Boston.
This was the Nile. More than four thousand miles to the north, the waters trickling through
my fingers would meet the spectacular coast of the Mediterranean Sea. I was going to fol-
low them, walking every step of the way.
What we were standing beside was only one of many contenders for the true source
of the river. What we think of as the Nile is actually the confluence of two great rivers,
the Blue Nile, whose waters rise in the highlands of Ethiopia, and the longer White Nile,
whose tributaries stretch further south, through Uganda, past Lake Victoria and Tanzania,
until they turn into the faint trickle whose waters I was now tasting. Even this is contested.
White Nile purists are fervent in their belief that the Nile only truly begins at Jinja on the
northernmost shore of Lake Victoria, but those with a less conservative approach argue
that the river actually flows into Lake Victoria from the west. Here it has no name, but a
few miles downstream it is known as the Mbirurumbe, and after that the Nyaborongo, and
after that the Kagera; as wide as the Nile and longer than the Thames, the Kagera itself has
tributaries originating in both Rwanda and Burundi. It was the longest of these, by a scant
thirty miles, that Amani was showing us now.
The Nile has captured the imagination of mankind since the days of the Pharaohs, and
the mystery of its source is one that held explorers at bay for millennia. The location of this
little spring was a question that confounded Alexander the Great. It was a secret denied to
the Roman Emperor Nero despite his expeditions upriver from the delta far to the north.
In Rome, in 1651, a public fountain - the Fountain of the Four Rivers - was erected to
depict the four major rivers of the known world, and the Nile was portrayed by a god with
a cowled head, symbolising the fact that nobody could ever know from where the wa-
ters came. For a fascinating period in the middle of the 19th century, the urge to discover
this tiny water source became a kind of grail quest for a particularly dedicated, and often
idiosyncratic, group of British explorers. Piece by piece, these reckless, intrepid individu-
als had forced the mighty Nile to give up its secrets - by guile, pig-headedness and sheer
power of will. Some of those explorers gave their lives to accomplishing this quest - oth-
