Within a few hundred metres of the western side of the sand-dunes the road commences the descent from the plateau into the oasis-depression. The road enters at the most northerly extremity of the oasis, the descent being particularly easy at this point, passing the large dark-coloured hill, Jebel Horabi (or Morabi?), on the right almost immediately afterwards. A fine view of the depression is obtainable from the top of the escarpment, a broad low-lying expanse, bounded by steep escarpments or walls, stretching away to the south, its monotony relieved by several large flat-topped hill-masses, near which, on the lowest portions of the floor, dark areas, the cultivated lands and palm-groves can be distinguished. The road crosses the depression in a south-westerly direction, passes a spring known as Ain el Gidr, the first watering place, and divides in front of the great hill-masses separating the two groups of villages, the eastern branch keeping close under the eastern scarp of Jebel Mayesra, to avoid a large area of soft salty ground, and leading to the villages of Zubbo and Mandisha, While the western branch continues its course to the cultivation surrounding El Qasr and Bawitti. The distance by this road from Qasr el Lamlum Bey to the village of Zubbo is 190 kilometres and to Bawitti 195 kilometres. [Sidenote: Geology of the Feshn-Baharia] Having now described the topographical features of this road, the chief geological characters may be noticed. The plain between the Nile Valley cultivation and the scarp of the plateau is covered with sandy gravel, partly downwash from the higher ground in Recent times, and partly the remains of definite gravel deposits belonging to the Nile Valley Pleistocene series.[22] The pebbles now found strewn over the plain consist chiefly of flints, doubtless derived from the Eocene limestones forming the deserts on both sides of the Nile Valley, and occasional pebbles of hard felspar porphyry which must have originally been derived from the igneous massifs of the Red Sea Hills. Both are well rounded, although the former are frequently broken up into angular fragments by temperature changes. White granular beds of gypsum, of various degrees of impurity, crop out on the plain in places, and in all probability there was in Pleistocene times an extensive deposit of this mineral all over the surface of the low-lying country. In the desert lying between the Fayum and the Nile Valley further to the north, these gypseous beds occur of great thickness and wide extent, and the deposits crossed on this road are doubtless part of the same series.