He might have carried him round by the way of the Cape of
Good Hope. But not to speak of the passage through the whole length of the Mediterranean, and another passage up the Persian Gulf and Red Sea, such a supposition would involve the complete circumnavigation of all Africa in three days, not to speak of the Tigris waters, near the site of Nineveh, being too shallow for any whale to swim in.
"I suppose that, after visiting the curious coasts of Arabia and Egypt, the Nautilus will go down the Indian Ocean again, perhaps cross the Channel of Mozambique, perhaps off the Mascarenhas, so as to gain the Cape of
Good Hope."
It was somewhere near the Cape - THE Cape being, of course, the Cape of
Good Hope, the Cape of Storms of its Portuguese discoverer.
Livingstone, in multiplying his fearless explorations from the Cape of
Good Hope to the basin of the Zambesi; Captains Burton and Speke, in the discovery of the great interior lakes, have opened three highways to modern civilization.
On the mountains of Abyssinia, several European forms and some few representatives of the peculiar flora of the Cape of
Good Hope occur.
We sailed with a fair wind to the Cape of
Good Hope, where we staid only to take in fresh water.
The beginning of this voyage was very prosperous: we were neither annoyed with the diseases of the climate nor distressed with bad weather, till we doubled the Cape of
Good Hope, which was about the end of May.
One was the British consul at Suez, who, despite the prophecies of the English Government, and the unfavourable predictions of Stephenson, was in the habit of seeing, from his office window, English ships daily passing to and fro on the great canal, by which the old roundabout route from England to India by the Cape of
Good Hope was abridged by at least a half.
The great revolving light on the cliff at the channel flashed warm and golden against the clear northern sky, a trembling, quivering star of
good hope. Far out along the horizon was the crinkled gray ribbon of a passing steamer's smoke.
The sun was setting when they reached the wicket-gate at which the path began, and, as the rain falls upon the just and unjust alike, it shed its warm tint even upon the resting-places of the dead, and bade them be of
good hope for its rising on the morrow.
In the European division of the world, we must look back to the tertiary epochs, to find a condition of things among the mammalia, resembling that now existing at the Cape of
Good Hope. Those tertiary epochs, which we are apt to consider as abounding to an astonishing degree with large animals, because we find the remains of many ages accumulated at certain spots, could hardly boast of more large quadrupeds than Southern Africa does at present.
And yet
good hope is mine that I shall find A welcome from my sire, a welcome too, From thee, my mother, and my brother dear; From with these hands, I laved and decked your limbs In death, and poured libations on your grave.