The evenings we spend on board, then I have the geography explained to me by our _khawass_, Hagi Ibrahim, or take some Nubians to my camels, to learn their language. I have already prepared a long vocabulary of the Nubian language. On a comparison with other lists, in Rüppell and Cailliaud, I also found in Koldági one of the languages spoken in the southernmost part of Kordofan, many similar words, which testify a narrow connection between the two languages. The Arabs call the Nubian language _lisân rotâna_, which I at first took for its actual name; it signifies, however, only a foreign language, distinct from the Arabic. Therefore if the three Nubian dialects are spoken of, they are not only called Rotâna Kenûs, Mahass, or Donqolaui, but also Rotâna Dinkaui, Shilluk, even Turki and Franki, Turkish and Frank, _i. e._ European gibberish. The same error is at the bottom of the now received designation of the Nubians as Berbers, and their language as the Berber language; for this is not their national name, or that of the language, as it is generally believed, but means originally the foreign-speaking persons, the Barbaros.[76] On the 25th of February we landed near Saba Doleb; I sought for ruins, but only found tall, well-built cupolas of burnt brick, in the form of beehives, and erected in quite a similar manner to the Greek Thesauri, in horizontal layers. They are the graves of holy Arab sheikhs of a late era; the villagers did not know what date to assign for their erection. Under the cupola, in the middle of the building of fifteen to eighteen feet in diameter, is the long narrow grave of the saint, surrounded with larger stones and covered with a multitude of little ones, according to the superstition one thousand in number. I found six such domes, most of them half dismantled, some quite ruined, but two tolerably well preserved, and still visited; a seventh, probably the latest, was built of unburnt bricks.