Note (return) — SPECIMENS (continued 2)

It therefore appears to me, and I really think it must appear to every unbiassed investigator of African geography, that every iota of African discovery, made successively, by Hornemann 316, Burckhardt, and others, tends to confirm my water communication between Timbuctoo and Cairo, and the theorists and speculators in African geography, who have heaped hypothesis upon hypothesis, error upon error, who have raised splendid fabrics upon pillars of ice, will ere long close their book, and be compelled, by the force of truth and experience, to admit the fact stated about twelve years ago by me in my account of Marocco, &c. viz. that the Nile of Sudan and the Nile of Egypt are identified by a continuity of waters, and that a water communication is provided by these two great rivers from Timbuctoo to Cairo; and moreover, that the general African opinion, that the Neel-el-Abeed (Niger) discharges itself into the (Bahar el Mâleh) Salt Sea, signifies neither more nor less than that it discharges itself at the Delta in Egypt, into the Mediterranean Sea!