The building is about eighty feet long, and exactly half as broad. The north wall is ruined. The church is surrounded by a great court, the outer walls of which, as also the numerous partly vaulted convent cells, still well preserved, are built of rude blocks. Before the western entrance of the church, separated only by a little court, lies the largest building, forty-six feet in length, probably the house of the prior, from which a particular side entrance led into the church. On the south side of the convent are two church-yards; the western one, about forty paces from the church, contained a number of graves, which were simply erected of black stones collected together. Nearer to the buildings was the eastern one, which was remarkable for a considerable number of grave-stones, partly inscribed in Greek and partly in Koptic, which will cause me to make a second visit to this remarkable convent before our departure from Barkal. I counted more than twenty inscribed stones, of which some had of course suffered extremely, and as many slabs of baked earth, with inscriptions scratched upon them, almost all, however, broken to pieces. They contain the most southern Greek inscriptions which have yet been discovered in the Nile regions, with the exception of the inscription of Adulis and Axum in Abyssinia; and though it be not doubtful that the Greek language after the promulgation of Christianity, the traces of which we can detect in architectural remains farther than Soba, was used and understood by the natives in all the flourishing countries up to Abyssinia, at least for religious purposes; yet these epitaphs, (among which, on a cursory examination, I could find none in the Ethiopian,) seemed to point to immigrating Græco-Koptic inhabitants of the old convent. I left my comrades here, who went direct to Abu Dôm at five o’clock, and proceeded to Nuri. Soon there gleamed towards us the blue heights of Mount Barkal, which rises alone with steep sides and a broad platform from the surrounding plain, and immediately attracts attention by its peculiar shape and situation. At six o’clock, the Nile valley lay before us in its whole and somewhat broad extent; a sight long desired, after the desert, and which excites the attention of travellers as much as the nearing coasts after a sea-voyage.