In Wildest Africa

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER II THE ROMANCE OF AFRICAN EXPLORATION NTIL the latter half of the nineteenth century, Central Africa was almost a sealed book to the historian and map- maker. This fact, while not remarkable in the case of some parts of South America, Australasia, and other savage or inaccessible territory, is...
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Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER II THE ROMANCE OF AFRICAN EXPLORATION NTIL the latter half of the nineteenth century, Central Africa was almost a sealed book to the historian and map- maker. This fact, while not remarkable in the case of some parts of South America, Australasia, and other savage or inaccessible territory, is astonishing in the case of Africa when we consider that civilization had one of its cradles in Ancient Egypt, and Africa has for ages paid enormous tribute in slaves, ivory, gold, precious stones, and other treasure to the rest of the world. Ancient Egypt entered into the arena of life, love and war, of human knowledge and concentred power, full statured and armed, wise and terrible as Pallas Athene springing into being from the temples of Zeus. Her history was cut on pages of stone, and the books that tell of her are the pyramids and obelisks, constructions colossal and enigmatic, the granite epitaphs of buried dynasties. Without record of previous barbarism or dependency, we find her first known monarch a man of letters and his first work a medical treatise. While we may not certainly fix the chronology of the more ancient Egyptian dynasties, and authorities differ widely as to the date of the reign of King Menes ? from 5702 B. c. (Boeck) to 2000 B.c. (Sharp) ?there is no doubt that, fifty centuries ago, Egypt, mother of nations, ruled the larger part of the Nile Valley, and, by forced tribute or peaceful barter, controlled the commodities of the Upper Nile far to the southward of Khartum, which, within the memory of living men, was considered the furthest outpost of civilization on the White Nile. We know also that the Pharaohs maintained a corps of Pahars or scouts, who in peace and war explored the outlands and recorded and reported all that the ruler o...