If you’re looking for a catchy but modest (possibly faux-modest) title for your travel book then you could do a lot worse than A Walk Across Africa, James Augustus Grant’s 1864 volume, especially since it has the knockout subtitle Or, Domestic Scenes from My Nile Journal.
Grant’s book tells in part the story of his expedition with John Hanning Speke in search of the source of the Nile at Lake Victoria: they found it, more or less.
Speke was a profound, and in some sense perhaps ultimately a mortal, enemy of Sir Richard Francis Burton. They too travelled together in search of the source of the Nile, and failed to find it, more or less.
The two men loathed each other. Speke shot himself (accidentally? we don’t know) the day before he was about to have a public debate with Burton. This is Speke being chased by Somalis, on an earlier expedition with Burton.
There’s a tendency, and I share it, to find yourself ‘supporting’ either Speke or Burton as though they were opposing football teams, and I’m totally with Burton, even if I accept that at this point in history it’s a fairly meaningless kind of support.
Burton’s great memorial is his famous tomb in Mortlake in the shape of a Bedouin tent.
Speke’s memorial, which I only recently discovered, is an obelisk made of Aberdeen red granite, which is located in Kensington Gardens, not a million miles away from the Peter Pan statue. A plaque set in the ground tells us the memorial was sponsored by Sir Roderick Murchison of the Royal Geographical Society, and paid for by public subscription.
My unscientific observation when I went there is that the people who walk through Kensington Gardens, often with their dogs, pay very little attention to the Speke obelisk, although one or two of them did pay attention to me because I was looking at it with such intensity, and taking photographs, and they probably thought I was a nutter, so they walked on that much faster.
The memorial, as all true obelisk fans with observe, is not a true obelisk since it’s in three parts. A true obelisk is made from a single piece. I suppose that Aberdeen granite doesn’t come in big enough chunks.
