John Hanning Speke although the pair seemed to have shared the hardships and labors of the journey pretty much evenly. Once it became clear that Speke might have found the source of the Nile the relationship deteriorated further. Why Burton did not journey back to Lake Victoria with Speke to make a better reconnoitre of the Lake after Speke returned to base camp in Kazeh is unclear. Burton was incapacitated and had to be carried by bearers but this had been true for a great deal of the trip. While Speke and Burton were instrumental in bringing the source of the Nile to
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