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1. Approaching the source of the Nile 3. Another discovery of the source of the Nile
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James Bruce
2. Source of the Nile
Now Bruce gets mad.
No more stalling, he tells his guide. He wants to see
the headwaters of the Nile.
He takes off his shoes, and plunges down the
green hill through thick flowers, then through a marsh to an island, with an
island, shaped like an altar, in the middle of which rises a fountain,
giving life to the Nile.
Here is the answer to more than a thousand years of
questions; the goal of countless explorers; the mystery behind the ancient
holy river. The moment is dramatic enough to stick in anyone's memory, so I
find it believable that Coleridge might recall the details when envisioning
a wilderness plot, green and fountainous.
But Lowes suggests that the description might also link, in Coleridge's
memory, with passages in Bartram, tramping through Florida. Bruce's "hillock
of green sod" might chime with Bartram's "swelling green knoll" by the "inchanting
fountain." Bruce's hillside "thick grown over with flowers" might echo the
flowers in Bartram; the water being "forced itself out with great violence"
resembles the Manatee Spring in Bartram, with water bubbling up,
intermittently, then settling down.
Lowes imagines that these visual memories link together, and he calls them
the "hooks and eyes of the memory." He concludes:
The vivid images of fountains in Florida and Abyssinia, with their powerful
ejected streams, have coalesced in the deep Well and risen up together, at
once both and neither, in the dream.
So for Lowes, the sacred river flows from Ethiopia, Kashmir, and Florida. |
 Other sources
William Bartram |