"Herodotus tells us," said Thrasyllus, "that the mysterious sources of the Nile ought to be here, near Syene and Elephantina, and that the canal which leads to them is an abyss and a bottomless sea! But Herodotus often tells us fairy-tales! For observe, the abyss, the bottomless sea, is covered all over with islands; and they are inhabited; and the sources of the Nile are certainly not here!"
At Tachampso the travellers again took a boat. But the Ethiopian forests were now to be traversed. Lucius mounted his elephant; the others mounted camels; more camels carried tents and luggage, of which there was now only a little; and Caleb had hired a strongly-armed escort of powerful Libyans and swift-footed Arabs. For, though the Ethiopians themselves were not warlike and offered no danger to the travellers, there were the savage races, the Troglodytæ, the Blemmyes, the Nubians, the Megabari, and, above all, the Ochthyophagi and Macrobii, who, if they were not overawed by the sight of a strong and numerous force, might surprise and plunder the travellers. The civilized world ended here. This was the very end of the world. True, on the Nile there was still Napata and the Ethiopian capital, Meroe; but beyond that was buried the secret of the world's end, the secret of the sources of the Nile, the secret of the horizons of the earth, the secret of the endless sea surrounding the world. Here, in these forests, began the temptation merely to go on and on, to go on in order to learn what the end would be, with what temptations and with what dread perils. Caleb told of travellers who had gone on and on and who had seen Typhon's awful giant head appear above the edge of the world, with gaping mouth; and he had swallowed them up. One guide had escaped and had told it to Caleb, who said that he was worthy of belief. There also, in the immeasurable ocean that washed the world's edge, lay the great serpent, which coiled itself in spirals and then covered the whole surface of the water, as far as the eye could reach, when it came up to bask in the scorching heat of the southern sun. Once, said Caleb, some daring travellers, who thought that the snake was a sort of dark desert, had walked over its scales, for miles on end, until the snake moved and they realized the terror and slipped into the sea in which you sink and sink and sink, for three centuries, before reaching the bottom of Typhon's Hell.