red* and then furnishing abundance of frogs, though what damage, even if not immediately cancelled, the frogs were to have done naturalists ask in vain. So grave a calamity was the failure of the Nile that Isaiah could foretell no punishment more severe for the Egyptians. There breathes over this mysterious river a spirit of fatalism which infects only those who have drifted on its bosom, a witchery which whispers of the Pharaohs and of Cleopatra, a personality which inspired Hackländer with that thought of his :

'Er ist wie gemacht zu den leidenschaftlichen Träumen der Orientalen.'

Its

The Nile is, and ever will be, a river of mystery. secrets have been ravished by geographers. The long and painful process of exploring its hidden sources, which began in the reign of Nero and continued to that of Victoria, is ended, and to-day there are many who, having seen no river greater than the Thames, know that the Nile flows from somewhere south of the equator, possibly from Ptolemy's elusive Mountains of the Moon. But not the most exact appreciation of the river's indebtedness to the great lakes of equatorial Africa, not the most accurate measurement of its volume, speed, and basin can dispel the strange and baffling sensation of the unknowable which invades those who drift between its banks. Near the foaming falls below Lake Victoria, it must present a very different spectacle, but at Cairo its movements, like those of some great python winding through the reeds, suggest nothing more than oriental languor. It is the river of Time; and, murmuring low among its papyrus beds, it laughs at maps and figures as the puny guesswork of mortals, a thousand generations of whom it has seen go out into the eternity of which itself is the symbol.

Small streams can be hostile as well as great, and the Nile is perhaps the greatest in the world, yet at no stage of its being does it give more trouble than the wicked little Chagres, which runs its whole course within the

* This chameleon change has been noticed in other rivers of Africa. In his 'Great Rift Valley,' Gregory alludes to a similar phenomenon in the Tana river, which, like the Nile, turned red in a night, probably, he thought, from a wash-out of iron oxide.

isthmus of Panama. I once saw the Chagres rise ten

feet in as many hours! For months together it slumbers in a ditch. Then, in a single night, drunken with rains, swollen with pride, it races over its banks and undoes the work of weeks. For its size it is harder to control than Niagara itself. One day it will coo like a dove; the next it roars like a lion. For weeks it is the willing ally of the canal-builders; for months a more implacable foe to them than fever or bed-rock.

The economic interest of a river is many-sided. It is at once the frontier and the playground, the artery of commerce, and the highway of civilisation. It sends fish to our tables, it works our machinery, it collects the rains of heaven-this with the help of its parents the mountains-and carries waste water to the regions which thirst for it. It is man's friend, where the sea is too often his enemy, grinding the shores it guards, and taking fearful toll of all who trust it. The river, save in the rare relapse of a seasonable flood, befriends those who dwell upon its banks. Therefore it has held its place in poetry and in song, in picture, in sacred lore, and in mythology. Rivers meander through the Bible, source of so many founts of later poetry. The Psalmist, whoever he was, loved them well, and they filter softly through those wondrous songs of his. In their whisper he read the promise of infinite mercy, and for the righteous he could find no better place than that of a tree planted by the rivers of water. In the mythologies of many lands rivers roll sonorously, and none with more grandeur than, in Hindu legend, the Ganges, the Nile of India, yet, unlike the Nile, never destructive or capricious, but, always helped by its ally the Jumna, covering the land with fertilising silt and providing a highway from the sea to within 200 miles of its birthplace in the ice caverns of the 'House of Frost' which men call Himalaya. We read of this mighty stream in the 'Mahabharata' as springing from the tangled hair of Siva, and flowing beneficently over the earth; and it is to-day the proudest humiliation of orthodox Hindus to prostrate themselves before their benefactor. There is something singularly sympathetic about this river-worship. There are moments in which it invades minds attuned to the higher ideals of other faiths.

Poets, medieval and modern, have used the river freely in their music. Burns held that a poet's best

inspiration lay

'Adown some trotting burn's meander.'

Spenser weaves the rhythm of it into his 'Prothalamium':

'Sweete Thames! runne softly till I end my Song.'

And the eternal river croons low through all his 'Spousall Verse,' while nymphs gather flowers, and swans come swimming along the lee, and brave knights win fair ladies for their own. Ruskin makes all the magic of his poetic prose with his Golden River,' which can shimmer like a shower of gold or roll in black waves like thunder-clouds. Dreamily the yellow Oxus goes curdling on its sinuous way through Matthew Arnold's legend of 'Sohrab and Rustum,' and surely the concluding lines are the noblest picture of an estuary in print:

'But the majestic river floated on,

Out of the mist and hum of that low land,

Into the frosty starlight. . . .

Right for the polar star, past Orgunjé,

Brimming, and bright, and large; then sands begin

To hem his watery march, and dam his streams,

And split his currents.

till at last

The long'd-for dash of waves is heard, and wide
His luminous home of waters opens, bright

And tranquil, from whose floor the new-bathed stars
Emerge, and shine upon the Aral Sea.'

These are magnificent lines; but there is more homely music in the voice of the river which glides past manytowered Camelot :

'Willows whiten, aspens quiver,

Little breezes dusk and shiver

Through the wave that runs for ever

By the island in the river

Flowing down to Camelot.'

And, at the end, it is still flowing when it bears the barge with her who died in music, like the swan:

'For ere she reach'd upon the tide
The first house by the water-side,
Singing in her song she died,
The Lady of Shalott.'

*

The allurement of the river never dies. Its paradox is challenging, for it remains the same through generations of mankind, yet changes from one moment to the next with a panorama of recurring effects like those obtained with children's toys in which a few figures revolve on an endless ribbon. From source to sea, or from estuary to headwaters, the exploration of ignota flumina is still, as ever, our dear delight. Insatiable curiosity, academic or commercial, led the forerunners of modern empire up the great rivers of untrodden lands. Dark results, indeed, have followed what Dr Scott Keltie well calls the 'scramble' for the control of the Congo. With what high hopes Stanley set off up the great river thirty years ago. Alas! with what realisation. Little less romantic has been the fight for the Niger, involving us not only with the natives, but also with our French neighbours, for whom that river was the predestined high road to Timbuctoo. With the exploration and development of the Niger region are associated the names of Barth, Laird, Croft, Taubmann-Goldie, and Flegel. The exploration of the Gambia, one of the earliest accounts of which, lately reprinted, is 'The Golden Trade,' by Richard Jobson (1623), has not figured in history like that of its great sisters, for the deadly climate of the regions through which it flows to the Atlantic has precluded the same keen competition for supremacy. Whatever the motive, the ascent or descent of a strange river has always exercised peculiar fascination for the adventurous. It may be that, as suggested in a recent number of this Review, the surprises are for him who follows the stream to its source. At any rate there is for such a one the constant challenge of something beyond:

'Something hidden. Go and find it.

Go and look behind the ranges.'

Biographers find the same result.

The boy prepares

+ The Upper Anio,' 'Quarterly Review, October 1909.'

them for the man, but maturity gives little clue to the beginnings. And, as the voyager proceeds on his smooth journey, he finds some epithet to fit the river of his travels. Spenser has quaint fancies of the kind when mustering his rivers to the wedding of the Thames and Medway.*

The river is a creature of light. It dazzles in the sun; it gleams like molten silver in the moon. Even with the land in utter darkness, it seems, like a ribbon of luminous paint, to send forth rays stored earlier in the day, for here, as at sea, absolute darkness is the rare exception. There is indeed something peculiarly impressive about night on a river. The strange beauty of such a scene on the Tana is vividly conveyed in a passage in Mr Rider Haggard's 'Allan Quatermain':

'The moonbeams played upon the surface of the running water that speeded unceasingly past us towards the sea, like men's lives towards the grave, till it glittered like a wide sheet of silver, that is in the open where the trees threw no shadows. Near the banks, however, it was very dark, and the night wind sighed sadly in the reeds. Above was the black bosom of the cloud, and beneath me swept the black flood of the water, and I felt as though I and Death were utterly alone between them. It was very desolate.'

...

Nor is there any need for those in search of such eerie sensations to seek the streams of equatorial Africa. I remember once, many years ago, when after wild-fowl in the river Blackwater (Essex), being tide-bound at midnight in a small boat off an agreeable spot known encouragingly as Death-hole Creek, and the hours of waiting were as startling as those related by Quatermain.

That some rivers are muddier than others arises from the nature of the land they flow through. I once wandered in the same week along the muddy Jordan and beside the glacial Barada,† which rushes from the Anti-Lebanon to make music outside the crumbling walls of Damascus. To see these two rivers is to appreciate the sting in the taunt uttered by Naaman the leper:

* Faerie Queene,' book iv, canto 11.

↑ Probably the Abana of 2 Kings v, 12. See Macgregor, 'The Rob Roy on the Jordan,' p. 101.