While we were obliged to wait for the camels, I crossed to Begerauîeh again, to seek some ruins, said to lie more to the north. From El Guês, I got to the two villages of Marûga, lying not very far from one another, in three-quarters of an hour. A great number of grave mounds lie to the east of the first of these, on the low heights, looking like a group of pyramids in the distance. The elevation runs along in a crescent-like form, and is covered with these round hillocks of black desert-stones, which were fifty-six in number, on my counting them from a large one in the centre. Five minutes farther into the desert is a second group of similar hillocks, twenty-one in number; but many others are scattered around on small single plateaux. Still lower down and nearly by the bushes, I found to the south of both groups, another, consisting of forty graves, of which some still clearly showed their original four-cornered shape. The best grave had fifteen to eighteen feet on each side; it had been, like several others, dug up in the middle, and had filled itself with pluvial earth, in which a tree was growing; at another there was still a great four-cornered circumvallation of twenty-four paces to be seen; the undermost foundations were built of little black stones; and a tumulus seems to have been erected inside the enclosure, though not in the middle. Another well-preserved stronger circumvallation had a little less extent, but seemed to have been quite filled up by a pyramid. Of an actual casing there was nothing to be seen anywhere. The hillocks went farther south into the bushes, and altogether they might be estimated at two hundred in number. Perhaps they continued to stretch along toward Meroe, at the edge of the desert, whither I should have ridden, had I not sent the boat, which I had now to find in a hurry, too far down the river. It seems from this that here was the actual burial place of Meroë, and that pyramidal, or when flat sides were wanted, tumular hillocks of stone were the usual form of the graves of private persons also at that period. LETTER XXII. BARKAL. _May 9, 1844._ The desert of Gilif, which we traversed on our way hither, in order to cut off the great eastern bend of the Nile, takes its name from the principal mountain lying in the midst of it. On the maps it is confused with the desert of Bahiûda, joining it on the south-east, and through which lies the road from Chartûm to Ambukôl and Barkal. Our direction was at first due east to a well, then north-west through the Gilif mountains to the great Wadi Abû Dôm, which then conducted us in the same direction to the westerly bend of the Nile.