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          Lake Victoria
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| The world's longest river, the Nile flows for 4,160 miles. The WHITE NILE rises in Lake Victoria, which is surrounded by the modern states of Uganda, Kenya and Tanzania, and travels northward to the Mediterranean. The much shorter BLUE NILE, which originates from Lake Tana in the Ethiopian highlands, joins the main river at the present-day Sudanese city of Khartoum. Between the latter and the city of Aswan, the river's flow is disrupted by six cataracts - hazardous waterfalls and rapids - and is navigable only up to the second cataract, for a total of 960 miles.
Although the explorer James Bruce traced the Blue Nile from its source to Khartoum in 1772, the source of the White Nile remained a mystery. In about 460 BC, the Greek historian Herodotus had been prevented from travelling further south on it by the first cataract at Aswan. In the 1st century AD, the Roman emperor Nero had sent an expedition led by two centurions down the Nile, but in Nubia (now Sudan), they had been blocked by impenetrable swamp. At about the same time, Diogenes, a Greek merchant, reported that he had journeyed inland for 25 days from the east coast of Africa until he had reached 'two great lakes and the snowy range of mountains whence the Nile draws its twin sources'. About a century later, the great geographer Ptolemy drew his celebrated map showing the White Nile rising from two round lakes that were in turn watered by the high range of the Lunae Montes - the Mountains of the Moon. The true source of the White Nile would only be discovered during the fraught expedition of Burton and Speke in 1856-8 - and even then the truth would cause controversy. |
