Note 7 — Chapter VII
Reading edition
None of the Egyptians, or Africans, or Grecians, with whom I had any discourse, would own to me their knowledge of the fountains of the Nile, except only a scribe of the sacred treasury of Minerva, in the city Sais in Egypt. He, indeed, cheerfully told me that he certainly was acquainted with them. But this was the account he gave, that there were two mountains, with peaked tops, situated between Syene, a city of Thebais, and Elephantina; the name of one of which was Krophi, of the other Mophi; that from the midst of these two mountains arose the bottomless fountains of the Nile; one part of its stream ran towards Egypt and the north, the other part towards Ethiopia and the south. But that the fountains were bottomless, he said that Psammeticus, a King of Egypt, had made the experiment; after having tied ropes of great length and let them down into the fountains, he could not reach the bottom.—Herodotus, book ii.