I thought then to myself, as I did at Rumanika's, when I first viewed the Mfumbiro cones, and gathered all my distant geographical information there, that these highly saturated Mountains of the Moon give birth to the Congo as well as to the Nile, and also to the Shire branch of the Zambeze.
I came, at the same time, to the conclusion that all our previous information concerning the hydrography of these regions, as well as the Mountains of the Moon, originated with the ancient Hindus, who told it to the priests of the Nile; and that all those busy Egyptian geographers, who disseminated their knowledge with a view to be famous for their long-sightedness, in solving the deep-seated mystery with enshrouded the source of their holy river, were so many hypothetical humbugs.

Reasoning thus, the Hindu traders alone, in those days, I believed, had a firm basis to stand upon, from their intercourse with the Abyssinians--through whom they must have heard of the country of Amara, which they applied to the N'yanza--and with the Wanyamuezi or men of the Moon, from whom they heard of the Tanganyika and Karague mountains.

I was all the more impressed with this belief, by knowing that the two church missionaries, Rebmann and Erhardt, without the smallest knowledge of the Hindus' map, constructed a map of their own, deduced from the Zanzibar traders, something on the same scale, by blending the Victoria N'yanza, Tanganyida, and N'yazza into one; whilst to their triuned lake they gave the name Moon, because the men of the Moon happened to live in front of the central lake.

And later still, Mr Leon, another missionary, heard of the N'yanza and the country Amara, near which he heard the Nile made its escape.
Going on with the march we next came to Ndongo, a perfect garden of plantains.

The whole country was rich--most surprisingly so.