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
The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night and appendices have been characterised as “obtrusive, kinky and highly personal”. In 1982, the International Astronomical Union (IAU) began naming features on Saturn's moon Enceladus after characters and places in Burton's translation because “its surface is so strange and mysterious that it was given the "Arabian Nights" as a name bank, linking fantasy landscape with a literary fantasy”. (See List of geological features on Enceladus.) Burton – an accomplished geographer, explorer, orientalist, ethnologist, diplomat, polylinguist and author – was best known in his lifetime for travelling in disguise to Mecca (1853) and for journeying (with John Hanning Speke) as the