In Ortum – a green village set in a valley between bare hills, I stopped. A gurgling river ran through it. The villagers farmed along the banks, and upon the pleats of the hills which later climbed into mountains. They lived in fear of the Lord, and of Illat the Lord of Death. The Lord of Death often appeared as a shadowy apparition on the riverbanks at dawn, but disappeared when you waved to him.

The river flooded often, and the local Anglicans noticed that onions did well in the narrow alluvial plains, and so, a miniature Nile valley of onions had sprung up in Ortum. At the bridge, which had collapsed, men with cracked faces and mouths full of profanities were forever getting in and out of trucks. They waited in line to suffer across the boulder strewn river bed.

I walked to the fuel station. In the sparse shadows along the river, I thought I saw Illat, but the apparition was human: an old man, stumbling in the shallows, panning for gold. When I called him, he scrambled and disappeared into the scrub.

The delay didn't worry me, it was a luxury I could afford. The previous day had been one of boredom and indifference, spent under a squeaking ceiling fan, in a grubby hotel room. Outside the hotel, the landscape had been one of identical slab-sided buildings -- an aspirational apartment culture trucked in from big city Nairobi -- but it just made the place look improper and grungy. There is a certain progress to be discovered in oddness, which is not to be found among obvious familiarities. As long as there is the unknown, there is hope. And so I had left, north-west, away from intimacy. (...)

In the maps Nasalot seems inconsequential, a mere footnote. We had driven past in the morning ignoring the weather-beaten signpost and the smoking shacks of the wardens.

On the way back the Lutheran decided to take the diversion. We crept past the still smoldering building which said ‘Head Quarters' – it had been deliberately torched, for there had been a termite infestation. In this part of Kenya , humanity is still dwarfed by the rigors of nature. All the rangers now roasted inside brand-new termite-proof, prefabricated tin structures.

“How are you?” one of them got up and said.
The Lutheran was a German, with a double-barreled name, which she now pronounced in an unfathomable manner to the lurching warden.
“My name is ________ _______ and I am here to….”
He waved us in hurriedly, still staggering under the blows of Franconian Deutsche.

We drove in silence. Every few minutes, the Lutheran's companion, a chubby woman dressed in a foolishly youthful checked shirt (‘chubby checker') whistled out a sentence with typical German pessimism: “Zere is nossing here…nossing at all…”

Nasalot is a big empty question mark of scrub, howling dust devils and towering termite mounds, which marks the borders of South Turkana with West Pokot and Uganda . Nobody ever comes here.

The bush trail appeared to end at a plunging precipice, the northern border of Nasalot. “We go south…” the Lutheran said with some certitude, after consulting an oil-drop compass. “But, zere is nossing…” chubby checker still whined.

Southside, the desolation is obvious, scorned even by termites. The Lutheran starred straight ahead and continued at a furious pace.
It was visible from afar, elsewhere it might have appeared ordinary, but in this vast emptiness, the solitary tree stood like a beacon.

“Felsblock…?!” chubby checker said, pointing towards the tree. The elephants appeared like boulders, carelessly placed in the shade of the tree. They had converged in the only available shadow for miles –and they stood there now glowering at us, as if worried we might take it from them.

The Lutheran and chubby checker squinted and said a prayer in German.

Three Mormons congregated at the only café on the deserted main street of Jinja.

The angel Moroni had appeared one day to Joseph Smith, the founding Prophet of the Mormons, and handed him a set of golden plates, which glittered with words inscribed by God in ancient Egyptian.  Smith translated the words in this “Golden Bible” into the Book of Mormon. Moroni was to reappear later and take the plates away from Joseph Smith. The three missionaries in the café quickly mumbled a prayer to the overflowing plates on the table, and then dug into the ham-burgers.  Their shirts were white, starched and stiff – the eldest of the three was a plump man moving on to fat, his name tag read: “Elder Aaron ________”.  Elder Aaron left in a Toyota pickup. The two younger men left on bicycles. The servile waiter frowned as he cleared their plates, they hadn’t left a tip.

The town centre was a dusty grid of single storied buildings, whitewashed and engraved with hindu numerals indicating the date of construction.  In the awning of one of the buildings dated 1931, rows of tailors pedaled away on old Remington and Singer sewing machines. The tailor was a drawn man with an infinite forehead, the expanse of which made him look unsettled and infirm. He had a hopeless smile and when he chuckled, it was borrowed laughter from a happier past. His wife and younger son worked behind in the shop.  As we stepped inside, a dog slunk out, its teeth crunching a bone.  The walls of the shop were bare, except for a portrait (clipped from a magazine) of Princess Diana and a yellowing photocopy of a degree certificate.  He had worked for an Indian ‘tailor master’, who had sold out and gone. The tailor spoke proudly of his son, who had been to a fashion school in Nairobi.  The elder had gone to Kampala and taken a degree in the sciences.  They had not heard from him since. The pleats on th e tailor’s brow reappeared: ‘He had a degree, and we had none.’

I saw them later -- him stooping and plodding through puddles of rain-water in his gum-boots, the wife and son, a few paces behind under an umbrella. They sang in choir, but with low voices, a gospel song which I didn’t understand.  

I rented a moto-taxi to take me to Bujagali, 4 kilometers away. The driver was called Okello and was from Buwayo a small village not far from the Kenyan border, “I belong there”, he said to me.  We stopped briefly at a cattle-dip to let a herd of long horned Zebu oxen cross the road.  As we waited, Okello told me he hated Jinja “Always rushing, hectic, too much hurry-hurry and fast-fast”. 

Afterwards, I searched for this hectic Jinja that he spoke off, and couldn’t find it.

The search for the source of the river Nile can be summarized thus:

Richard Burton and John Speke started from Zanzibar, in search of a “great lake in the mountains of the moon”, from where the Nile was said to originate.

The Egyptians believed that Isis, the goddess of fertility, sister and wife to Osiris the god of the dead, sat at the headwaters of the Nile. Ptolemy, the Greek geographer, placed Isis roughly in the middle of the African content, a place with a large lake, surrounded by snow capped mountains.  This two thousand year old Ptolemaic inaccuracy was the map guiding the two explorers.

They reached Lake Tanganyika, now in modern day Tanzania.  On the way, Burton mowed down a few locals, and obsessively took “measurements” of the men of various tribes along the way (the measuring instruments he had perfected while serving in India).  Speke, the more diplomatic one, coerced and bribed and also studied the flora and fauna. Burton was tall and built like a prize fighter. He carried deep scars on his cheeks, where once a Somali javelin had pierced him. Speke was shorter and deaf in one ear (a beetle had crawled in, and he had dug it out using a knife).  They were buddies, on a casual first name basis ( “Dick” and “Jack”).

At Tanganyika, Burton fell ill and dropped out.  Speke was going blind in one eye, but pushed further north with a small party, and reached what the locals knew as the “Sea of Ukwere”. He christened it Lake Victoria and promptly headed back to England, where he grandly announced the “discovery” of the Source of the Nile – Isis was unveiled.  Until then Burton had been the famous adventurer, the man with machismo, but now found himself out of the limelight. 

Speke was given funds to go on a longer exploratory trip. The slighted Burton made some noises that Speke was mistaken, and that the Nile really originated further south at Lake Tanganyika.  Few people listened. He grew a long beard, and went on a sabbatical to Mormon mecca – Salt Lake City. Here Burton quoted the Ancient Mariner upon sighting another lake – the great Salt Lake – ‘Water water everywhere, but not a drop to drink’.  After expressing his admiration for the practice of polygamy among the Mormons, he sailed back to England and married a staunch Catholic.

Speke navigated the Nile, reached Lake Victoria and named the waterfalls near the source as “Ripon Falls” after the main backer of the trip -- a Lord Ripon (who would later go on to become a Governor General of British India).  Speke returned from his successful second voyage – and Burton immediately challenged him to a one-on-one debate on the matter of the true Source.  It was to be a “duel for the Nile”. But, while out shooting partridges, Speke accidentally shot himself.  Burton quietly spread a devious rumor that Speke had in fact, committed suicide.

The source in Jinja has a concrete plaque, indicating the spot where Speke stood gazing at Lake Victoria and the Nile.  There is a neglected golf club next to it, in which the English writer Evelyn Waugh once drank a cup of tea and noted: “…the only course in the world which posts a special rule that the player may remove his ball from hippopotamus footprints….”  The hippos and resident crocodiles drowned after a dam was built across the Nile in 1954 at Ripon falls.