John Hanning Speke questions about the height and extent of the lake could not be answered easily. Speke's eyes were still bothering him and he only saw a small part of the southern end of the lake and his view was blocked by islands in the lake so he could not judge the size of the lake well. However, Speke did estimate the elevation of Lake Victoria at 4000 feet by observing the temperature at which water boiled at that level. (This lake's being substantially higher than Lake Tanganyika did make it a more likely candidate for the source of the Nile.) From
Mountains of the Moon (Africa) Speke in 1862 sought the source of the White Nile in the Great Lakes region. Henry Morton Stanley finally found glacier-capped mountains possibly fitting Diogenes's description in 1889 (they had eluded European explorers for so long due to often being shrouded in mist). Today known as the Rwenzori Mountains, the peaks are the source of some of the Nile's waters, but only a small fraction, and Diogenes would have crossed the Victoria Nile to reach them. Many modern scholars doubt that these were the Mountains of the Moon described by Diogenes, some holding that his reports were wholly fabricated. G.W.B.