File:SB-07-249-source-1.png

Summary

Description

The “High Places” of the Spirit Mtombwa: View of Mtombwa Urungu. Two terraced rock towers above a densely vegetated shore, with a boat and rowers on the water. The rock profiles, vegetation, boat, figures, foreground water and hatching match the illustration on H. P. Blavatsky's Scrapbooks, volume 7, page 249, item 1. The complete engraved frame, printed caption and lower-right volume marker are retained.

Henry M. Stanley, Through the Dark Continent, volume II (London: Sampson Low, Marston, Searle & Rivington, 1878), unnumbered plate facing printed p. 36. The exact title page prints the author, volume, publisher, place and 1878. Individual artist and engraver roles have not been established for this illustration; the book author's name is not assigned as an image credit.

The matching journal witness appears in Harper's New Monthly Magazine, vol. LVII, no. 341, October 1878, p. 679, in Through the Dark Continent. Its caption, like the scrapbook's, adds Lake Tanganika; the book caption ends with MTOMBWA URUNGU. This file uses the colour book witness and retains its own printed caption. The book author's identity is not automatically the journal article author's identity. Neither witness establishes the very first publication or the physical source copy used for the scrapbook cutting.

Source

Harold B. Lee Library, Brigham Young University, through Internet Archive, identifier throughdarkconti1878stan2, ARK ark:/13960/t7rn46m9h, catalogue call number DEG8027. Original colour camera JP2, raw leaf 55. Repository scandata records the preceding leaf 54 as printed p. 36, followed by this unnumbered right-hand plate. The access-viewer index n52 is distinct from raw leaf 55. The repository records a Canon EOS 5D Mark II camera. This file is cropped directly from the original camera image, without enlargement.

• Complete unnumbered plate, facing p. 36.
• Digitized volume and catalogue record.
• Original camera JP2 used for this file.
• Exact title page, volume II, dated 1878.
• Repository leaf and page numbering.
• Matching journal witness with the scrapbook's extended caption, October 1878, p. 679.

Thank you to the Harold B. Lee Library, Brigham Young University, and Internet Archive for preserving this volume and freely providing its original colour camera files.

File and processing

PNG, 2270 × 3600 pixels, RGB; natural paper colour retained. Original JP2: 5616 × 3744 pixels, 1505313 bytes, SHA-256 35ba9c810801a1f8c156c81dc8e5ea659558827b4f8800e75ab0183a082a357a.

Lossless 90-degree clockwise transpose to a 3744 × 5616 upright image, then native crop (180, 1120)–(2450, 4720); right and bottom bounds are exclusive. Alignment checked against 51 printed caption glyphs: fitted slope −0.037876 degrees. Already aligned; no additional fine rotation or resampling was needed. Full engraved composition, caption and volume marker are retained. No added canvas, enlargement, colour or tonal correction, sharpening, retouching or reconstruction was applied. PNG compression is lossless; the original file remains unchanged.

Rights

Historical illustration published in 1878, with copyright expired in the United States, reproduced by a faithful library scan. No Creative Commons licence or Public Domain Mark is attributed to this repository object.