Arcanum natura caput non prodidit ulli,Nec licuit populis parvum te, Nile, videre;Amovitque sinus, et gentes maluit ortusMirari, quam nôsse tuos.’”[12]
Arcanum natura caput non prodidit ulli,Nec licuit populis parvum te, Nile, videre;Amovitque sinus, et gentes maluit ortusMirari, quam nôsse tuos.’”[12]
Arcanum natura caput non prodidit ulli,Nec licuit populis parvum te, Nile, videre;Amovitque sinus, et gentes maluit ortusMirari, quam nôsse tuos.’”[12]
Arcanum natura caput non prodidit ulli,
Nec licuit populis parvum te, Nile, videre;
Amovitque sinus, et gentes maluit ortus
Mirari, quam nôsse tuos.’”[12]
12.Lucan, Phars. x. 295.
12.Lucan, Phars. x. 295.
His guide, who, having formerly committed a murder in the village of Geesh, was afraid to enter it, made a number of lame excuses for not accompanying him to the fountains, and at length confessed the truth. His apprehensions, however, were not proof against his vanity and avarice. He had long been desirous of possessing a rich sash which Bruce wore about his waist, and was bribed by this article of finery to approach somewhat nearer to the scene of his past villany. After leading the traveller round to the south of the church, beyond the grove of trees which surrounded it, “This,” says he, “is the hill which, when you were on theother side of it, was between you and the fountains of the Nile. There is no other. Look at that hillock of green sod in the middle of that watery spot; it is in that the two fountains of the Nile are to be found. Geesh is on the face of the rock where yon green trees are. If you go the length of the fountain, pull off your shoes as you did the other day; for these people are pagans, and believe in nothing that you believe, but only in this river, to which they pray every day, as if it were God; but this, perhaps, you may do likewise.”
“Half-undressed as I was,” says Bruce, “by the loss of my sash, and throwing off my shoes, I ran down the hill towards the little island of green sods, which was about two hundred yards distant. The whole side of the hill was thick grown over with flowers, the large bulbous roots of which appearing above the surface of the ground, and their skins coming off on treading upon them, occasioned two very severe falls before I reached the brink of the marsh. I after this came to the island of green turf, which was in form of an altar, apparently the work of art, and I stood in rapture over the principal fountain which rises in the middle of it.
“It is easier to guess than to describe the situation of my mind at that moment, standing in that spot which had baffled the genius, industry, and inquiry of both ancients and moderns for the course of near three thousand years. Kings had attempted this discovery at the head of armies, and each expedition was distinguished from the last only by the difference of the numbers which had perished, and agreed alone in the disappointment which had uniformly and without exception followed them all.... Though a mere private Briton, I triumphed here in my own mind over kings and their armies; and every comparison was leading nearer and nearer to presumption, when the place itself where I stood, the object of my vainglory, suggested what depressedmy short-lived triumph. I was but a few minutes arrived at the sources of the Nile, through numberless dangers and sufferings, the least of which would have overwhelmed me but for the continual goodness and protection of Providence; I was, however, but then half through my journey, and all those dangers which I had already passed awaited me again on my return. I found a despondency gaining ground fast upon me, and blasting the crown of laurels I had too rashly woven for myself.”
This was extremely natural. He had proposed to himself an object in itself rather curious than useful, and in all probability had in his imagination invested these fountains themselves with a magnificent or mysterious character which the realities were found not to possess, and that depression of spirit which is occasioned by disappointment ensued. Besides, he could scarcely seriously disbelieve the fact that Paez had visited the spot before him; and, therefore, that however great his pleasure might be, as “a private Briton,” triumphing in his own mind over kings and their armies, he was not really the first European who had approached these fountains; that is, was not the discoverer of them. The talking of kings at the head of armies having made the discovery of the sources of the Nile their object, and failed, is a mere rhetorical figure of speech. When Ptolemy Euergetes was at Auxum, what was there to hinder his proceeding to Geesh? Bruce’s mode of describing his own achievements is pompous and vain; but he had purchased the right to be a little vain at so dear a rate that we readily forgive him.
Having by numerous observations discovered that the fountains of the Nile are situated in latitude 10° 59´ 25´´ N., and in longitude 36° 55´ 30´´ E., Bruce, after a stay of six days, prepared to return to Gondar. While he remained at Geesh, he contrived with his usual address to acquire the confidence of the inhabitants, with whom he lived in great familiarityand harmony. These people, as his guide had informed him, really worship the Nile. Annually, on the first appearance of the dog-star, or eleven days afterward according to others, the servant, or priest, of the river assembles the heads of the clans around the principal fountain and altar. Having sacrificed a black heifer which has never borne a calf, they plunge the head of the beast into the fountain, and then draw it out, and wrap it up in the hide, previously sprinkled on both sides with the water of the river, so as that it may never more be seen by mortal. The body of the heifer is then divided into two parts, carefully cleansed, and placed upon the hillock, where it is washed with water brought in the hollow of the hand, for no dish must be used by the elders or principal persons of the tribes. The flesh is then cut into pieces, one for each clan, and eaten raw. They then quench their thirst with the sacred waters of the Nile, and burn the bones to ashes on the spot where they have been sitting. When this part of the ceremony is over, the head is carried into a cavern, which, they assert, extends under the fountains, and there certain mysterious rites, the nature of which has never been revealed, are performed. What becomes of the head is unknown. The Abyssinians, in hatred of their pagan subjects, assert that the powers of hell unite with the river worshippers in devouring it; but, however they may dispose of it, they certainly pray to the spirit residing in the river, whom they address as the Everlasting God, Light of the World, Eye of the World, God of Peace, the Saviour, and Father of the Universe.
Relics of serpent-worship, which has in all ages extensively prevailed in the East, were likewise observed among the Agows, who use them, as the Romans did their sacred chickens, for purposes of divination.
On the 10th of November Bruce took his leave of the fountains of the Nile, and returned to Gondar.Here, as the civil war still raged with unexampled fury, he was during a whole year witness of all those atrocities which ferocious barbarians exercise towards each other when excited by ambition or revenge. At the termination of this period, however, notwithstanding that old law of Abyssinia forbidding strangers to quit the country, which had a thousand times been broken, he obtained the king’s permission to depart, though not before he had taken a solemn oath, which he never intended to fulfil, that, after having visited his home and friends, he would return.
Leaving Gondar on the 26th of December, 1771, with a numerous suite of attendants, he proceeded through the northern provinces of Abyssinia, the country of the Shangalla, and crossing the rivers Rabad, Dender, and Nile, arrived on the 29th of April, 1772, at Sennaar, the capital of Nubia. The next morning after his arrival he was summoned into the presence of the king, whom he found in a small apartment in his vast clay-built palace, dressed very meanly, and reposing on a mattress covered with a Persian carpet. He was a “fellow of no mark or likelihood,” with a “very plebeian countenance;” but he received the stranger civilly, asked him numerous questions, and furnished him with a very comfortable dinner of camel’s flesh. The crowds in the streets, however, were exceedingly insolent; and while they affronted and hooted at him as he passed, he called to mind with horror that, but a few years before, this same mob had murdered a French ambassador with all his attendants.
At this city he was detained by various circumstances until the 8th of September, and during this period was enabled to make numerous inquiries into the history of the country, civil and natural, together with the manners, customs, religions, and character of its inhabitants. But when the day of departure arrived, he proceeded with indescribable pleasureon his journey, having the Nile on his right-hand, and the Bahr-el-Abiad, or White River, which he never approached, on the left. On the 21st he again crossed the Nile, and after travelling along its banks for several days, took a long leave of its stream, and plunged into the vast desert of Nubia. The soil here consisted of fixed gravel, of a very disagreeable whitish colour, mixed with small pieces of white marble and pebbles like alabaster, and wholly bare of trees. As they proceeded, indeed, a few patches of coarse grass, with small groves of acacia, met and refreshed the eye. On the 14th of November they halted in a small hollow, called Waadi-el-Halboub, and “were here at once surprised and terrified,” says Bruce, “by a sight surely one of the most magnificent in the world. In that vast expanse of desert, from west and to north-west of us we saw a number of prodigious pillars of sand, at different distances, at times moving with great celerity, at others stalking on with a majestic slowness. At intervals we thought they were coming in a very few minutes to overwhelm us, and small quantities of sand did actually more than once reach us. Again they would retreat, so as to be almost out of sight, their tops reaching to the very clouds. There the tops often separated from the bodies; and these, once disjoined, dispersed in the air, and did not appear more. Sometimes they were broken near the middle, as if struck with a large cannon-shot. About noon they began to advance with considerable swiftness upon us, the wind being very strong at north. Eleven of them ranged alongside of us about the distance of three miles. The greatest diameter of the largest appeared to me at that distance as if it would measure ten feet. They retired from us with a wind at S.E., leaving an impression upon my mind to which I can give no name, though surely one ingredient in it was fear, with a considerable deal of wonder and astonishment. It was invain to think of flying: the swiftest horse or fastest sailing ship could be of no use to carry us out of this danger, and the full persuasion of this riveted me as if to the spot where I stood.”
The appearance of these phantoms of the plain, as Bruce terms them, sent their guide to his prayers, and together with the danger which they were now in of perishing of thirst, produced in the whole party nothing but murmuring, discontent, and insubordination. Next day the moving sand-pillars again appeared. The sublimity of the scene,—a boundless desert, level as the sea, condemned to eternal desolation, without sounds or signs of life, animal or vegetable; the arid soil, drained of every particle of moisture, reduced by perpetual attrition to almost impalpable atoms, and raised aloft by whirlwinds into prodigious columns, which, as if instinct with life, glided along with preternatural rapidity,—all this, I say, no language, however magnificent, or exalted by metaphor and poetical fervour, could ever present in its proper terrors to the mind. These pillars on their second appearance were more numerous, but of inferior dimensions to those seen at Waadi Halboub. They had probably been careering over the waste in the darkness and silence of night; as, immediately after sunrise, they were observed, like a thick wood, reaching to the clouds, and almost darkening the sun, whose slanting rays, shining through them as they moved along, like enormous shadows, before the wind, gave them the appearance of pillars of fire. Our traveller’s attendants now became desperate: the Greeks shrieked out that the day of judgment was come; Ismael, a Turk, said it was hell; and the Africans exclaimed that the world was on fire. Bruce now demanded of their guide whether he had ever before witnessed such a sight. “Frequently,” replied the man, “but I have never seen a worse.” He added, however, that from the redness of the air, he dreaded the approach ofsomething much more terrible than these fiery columns,—thesimoom, which almost invariably ensued upon such a disposition of the atmosphere. This information greatly increased the apprehensions of the traveller; but he entreated the man to conceal his suspicions from their companions.
In the forenoon of the next day, being in sight of the rock of Chiggre, where they expected to refresh themselves with plenty of excellent water, and were therefore in high spirits, the guide cried out with a loud voice, “Fall upon your faces, for here is the simoom!” Bruce looked, he says, towards the south-east, and saw “a haze come in colour like the purple part of the rainbow, but not so compressed or thick. It did not occupy twenty yards in breadth, and was about twelve feet high from the ground. It was a kind of blush upon the air, and it moved very rapidly; for I scarce could turn to fall upon the ground with my head to the northward, when I felt the heat of its current plainly upon my face. We all lay flat on the ground, as if dead, till Idris (the guide) told us it was blown over. The meteor, or purple haze, which I saw, was indeed passed, but the light air that still blew, was of a heat to threaten suffocation. For my part, I found distinctly in my breast that I had imbibed a part of it; nor was I free of an asthmatic sensation till I had been some months in Italy, at the baths of Poretta, near two years afterward.”
The effect of this state of the atmosphere upon his companions was sudden and extraordinary. They were all seized with an unusual despondency, ceased to speak to each other, or if they spoke it was in whispers; from which Bruce conjectured, perhaps without reason, that some plot was forming against him. He therefore called them together, reprimanded them for their fears, exhorted them to take courage, reminded them, that whatever might be their sufferings, his own were not less than theirs;desired them to look at his swollen face, his neck blistered by the sun, his feet torn and bleeding, and to observe his voice nearly lost by the simoom. With respect to the scantiness of water, of which they had complained, he was so well persuaded that they had nothing to apprehend on this score, that he would allow each man an additional gourd-full from their present stock. In fact, if they lifted up their eyes, they would perceive in the distance, the bare, black, and sharp point of the rock Chiggre, where there was an abundance of water. The only point, therefore, was to hasten on in good spirits to this spot, where all their fears of perishing from thirst in the desert would immediately vanish. This speech restored the courage of the whole party, and they continued their march with something like energy. That same evening they reached Chiggre.
On the 17th of November they left the wells, and resumed their march through the desert. Having journeyed on during the greater part of the day, amused rather than terrified by the moving sand-columns, with which they were now become familiar, they halted late in the afternoon in a vast plain, “bounded on all sides by low sandy hills, which seemed to have been transported thither lately. These hillocks were from seven to thirteen feet high, drawn into perfect cones, with very sharp points, and well-proportioned bases. The sand was of an inconceivable fineness, having been the sport of hot winds for thousands of years.” These cones, in fact, were nothing more or less than the relics of a group of sandy pillars, which had been perhaps on the previous day in motion; and had they then advanced so far, might have overwhelmed them in their fall. Marks of the whirling motion of the pillars were distinctly seen in every heap.
In the course of the next day they passed by the spot where, but a few years before, one of the largest caravans that ever came out of Egypt,amounting to some thousands of camels, and conducted by the Ababdé and Bishareen Arabs, had been overwhelmed by a sand-storm; and the heaps which probably had collected over their bodies had somewhat raised the level of the desert in that place. Here numbers of gray granite rocks were scattered over the plain. A little beyond this they came to a wood of dwarf acacia-trees, which furnished a little browsing to their camels.
In the night of the 19th, while they were encamped at a well, an attempt was made by a single robber to steal one of their camels. From this circumstance, which informed them they were come into the neighbourhood of man, they began to fear that they had approached the camp of some of those wandering Arabs who extract a scanty subsistence out of these torrid plains, and dwell all their lives amid simooms and pillars of moving sand, which form the terror of all other men. In the morning, however, no Arabs appeared; all was still; but, in diligently scrutinizing the appearance of the sand, they discovered the track of a man, by following which they soon came in sight of two ragged, old, dirty tents, pitched with grass cords. Two of Bruce’s attendants found, on entering the smaller tent, a naked woman; and our traveller himself, and Ismael the Turk, saw, on entering the larger one, “a man and a woman, both perfectly naked; frightful emaciated figures, not like the inhabitants of this world. The man was partly sitting on his hams; a child, seeming of the age to suck, was on a rag at the corner, and the woman looked as if she wished to hide herself.” Upon these miserable wretches they all immediately rushed like wild beasts, threatening to murder them; and, in fact, brought them all bound to their encampment, with the intention, at least on the part of all but Bruce, to put them to death. However, after terrifying them greatly, and learning from them some particulars respecting the movementsof the tribe to which they belonged, it was resolved that the man should accompany them in chains, as a guide; and the women, after their camels had been lamed, left where they were until the return of their husband. If the man led them into danger he was to be put to death without mercy; if he served them faithfully Bruce engaged to clothe both him and his women, to present him with a camel, and a load of dora for them all.
On the 22d one of the African attendants was seized with a kind of phrensy, and, their anxiety for their own preservation having extinguished their humanity, was left to perish among the burning sands. Their camels were now dropping off one by one; their bread grew scanty; and the water they found in the wells was so brackish that it scarcely served to quench their thirst. Languor and inactivity seized upon them all; all the weighty baggage and curiosities, such as shells, fossils, minerals, the counter-canes of the quadrant, telescopes, &c., were abandoned, and inevitable death appeared to stare them in the face.
Their Bishareen prisoner, however, seemed not to be affected in the least, either by fatigue or the hot winds, and by his ingenuity in contriving a bandage for Bruce’s feet probably saved the traveller’s life. Here and there upon the sands, the bodies of men who had been murdered, and of camels which had perished for want, met their eyes; and suggested the thought that their own carcasses might shortly increase the number. Two of their camels, which kneeled down and refused to rise, they killed, preserving their flesh for food, and taking the water out of their stomachs, as a precious addition to their stock. One of the party had lost an eye, and others, more fortunate, perhaps, dropped down dead by the brink of the well where they had been quenching their thirst. Still they pushed forward, and at length Bruce announced to his followers that theywere approaching Assuan. “A cry of joy,” says he, “followed this annunciation. Christians, Moors, and Turks, all burst into floods of tears, kissing and embracing one another, and thanking God for his mercy in this deliverance; and unanimously, in token of their gratitude and acknowledgments of my constant attention to them in the whole of this long journey, saluting me with the name of Abou Ferege (Father Foresight), the only reward it was in their power to give.”
About nine o’clock next morning they beheld the palm-trees of Assuan, and shortly afterward arrived in a small grove in the environs of the city. The waters of the Nile being now before them, no consideration of prudence, no fears of the consequences which might possibly ensue, could check Bruce’s companions from running at once to the stream to drink. The traveller himself sat down among the trees, and fell asleep, overcome by heat and fatigue. However, when his arrival was made known to the Aga of Assuan, he was received and entertained with distinguished hospitality, and furnished with dromedaries to go in search of the baggage which he had been compelled to abandon in the desert. He then paid and discharged his guide; and to the Bishareen, who had faithfully served him from the day in which he took him prisoner, and was now become particularly attached to his person, he gave the privilege of choosing the best of his camels; and having, as he had promised, clothed him completely, and presented him with dresses for his wives, and a camel-load of dora, dismissed him. The Arab, whom almost unexampled misery had reduced to a robber, was so far overcome by his generous treatment, that he expressed his desires, with tears in his eyes, to enter Bruce’s service, and follow him over the world, having first returned into the desert, and provided for the subsistence of his family. This,however, could not be, and they parted, the Arab to his desert, and Bruce to his home.
From Syene, or Assuan, Bruce descended the Nile to Cairo, whence, after a short stay, he proceeded to Alexandria, and took ship for Marseilles. He remained some time on the Continent, where he was universally received in the most flattering manner, before he returned to his native land, which he did not reach until the middle of the summer of 1774, after an absence of twelve years. In 1776 he married a second time: by this wife he had two children, a son and a daughter; but he was not fortunate in his marriages, for in 1785 he again became a widower.
Various causes, among which the principal one appears to have been disgust at observing that his statements were in many instances thought unworthy of belief, retarded the composition and publication of his travels. At length, however, in 1790, seventeen years after his return to Europe, the result of his labours and adventures was laid before the world, and prejudice and ignorance united their efforts to diminish, at least, if they could not destroy, his chance of fame, the only reward which he coveted for all the hardships and dangers which he had encountered.
On the 27th of April, 1794, as he was conducting an aged lady from his drawing-room to her carriage, down the great staircase of his house at Kinnaird, his foot slipped, and falling with great force down several of the steps, he pitched upon his head, and was killed. He was buried in the churchyard of Larbert, in a tomb which he had erected for his wife.
I have carefully avoided interrupting the course of the narrative by entering into any discussions respecting those points on which Bruce’s veracity has been called in question. His detractors, without any exception of which I am aware, consist of men whose authority, in matters of this nature is nolonger respected, or who never, except from their numbers, possessed any. No man of competent understanding and knowledge of mankind can read Bruce’s Travels without a thorough conviction that the writer was a person of the strictest honour and veracity, who, though as in the case of Paez, he might be hurried by wounded pride and indignation into the commission of injustice, was wholly incapable of deliberate falsehood. That the name of Dr. Johnson is found among those of Bruce’s enemies, is to be regretted on Dr. Johnson’s own account. But the circumstance can excite no surprise in any one who recollects that the doctor likewise distinguished himself among the calumniators of Milton—a name which has long since ranked among the first which history records, and is the representative, as it were, of every thing that is most sacred in genius, and most unsullied in virtue. The other cavillers at Bruce demand no ceremony. Their absurd rancour has been stimulated by a secret conviction of their own inferiority in talent and enterprise; and, despairing of raising themselves to his level, they have endeavoured to bring him down to their own. Swift explains in two lines the whole philosophy of this proceeding:—
I have no title to aspire:Yet, if you sink,I seem the higher!
I have no title to aspire:Yet, if you sink,I seem the higher!
I have no title to aspire:Yet, if you sink,I seem the higher!
I have no title to aspire:
Yet, if you sink,I seem the higher!
It will be remembered that Marco Polo met with very nearly the same fate with Bruce, being not only disbelieved during his lifetime, but having to endure, even on his death-bed, the monstrous incredulity of his nearest relations, who, pressing around him, conjured him for the love of Christ, and the salvation of his soul, to retract the fictions which they imagined he had advanced in his writings. With the noble intrepidity which Bruce, I doubt not, would have shown under similar circumstances, he refused to abate a jot of his assertions, which, hesolemnly averred, fell far short of the truth. The persecution of Marco Polo, however, arose wholly from the ignorance of his contemporaries; but Bruce had a foible, abundantly visible in his writings, from which the great Italian traveller was altogether exempt—I mean an arrogant and intolerable vanity. Even the most charitable of readers must frequently, in perusing Bruce’s writings, be angered, if not disgusted, at its perpetual recurrence in the coarsest and most undisguised forms; but when we reflect, that notwithstanding this foible, or partly, perhaps, in consequence of it, he was one of the most enterprising, adventurous, and indefatigable of travellers, we readily consent to overlook this defect in consideration of the many excellences which accompany it. As a writer he is slovenly and immethodical, and destitute to a remarkable degree of the graces of style; but, on the other hand, he is always so much in earnest, and so natural, in spite of all that has been said to the contrary, that it would argue nothing short of actual stupidity to doubt of the truth of what he relates.