they found fruit-trees, and began to pluck the fruit. While they were doing so, certain very small men came upon them and took them prisoners. The Nasamonians could not understand them, nor make themselves understood. They were led by them across vast marshes, and at last came to a town where all the inhabitants were black dwarfs like their captors. A great river flowed by the town from west to east, abounding in crocodiles. And all the people in the town were wizards. It was added that the explorers returned in safety from their perilous journey. If the Bushmen now surviving at the Cape, and formerly more extensively spread over Africa, were a black race, which they are not, we might suppose them to be the descendants of the little men spoken of by Herodotus. Their colour may, however, have been modified by the temperate climate of South Africa in the course of long ages. The tribe of Dokos, in the south-west of Abyssinia, are dwarfish, and answer very nearly to Herodotus's description. Herodotus was inclined to identify the Kile with the river flowing by the mysterious city.[1]
It is strange that the oldest geographical problem in the world should be a problem still, though now probably in the course of solution. The nearest approach to the truth appears to have been made by the Alexandrian geographer, Ptolemy, who had heard of certain lakes as the sources of the Nile, and placed them some ten degrees south of the equator. The question slumbered through the middle ages, and one affluent after another was looked upon as the true Nile, till
- ↑ It was more probably, as Mr Rawlinson and Mr Blakesley both think, the Niger, and the city may have been Timbuctoo.
