With much trouble we arrived the next day, before the camels were ready, at the island of Ishishi, surrounded by violent and dangerous eddies. We here found ruins of walls and buildings of brick, sometimes of stone, both hewn and unhewn, which leads us to the conclusion that they must have served as fortifications to the island at different times; yet there were no inscriptions, excepting one in a few unintelligible signs. We did not mount our camels at Kasinqar until after nine o’clock, and rode along the right hand shore, between the granite rocks, which leave but very little room for a scanty vegetation. The eye is relieved almost wholly in the numerous, and generally smaller islands, by green clumps of trees and cultivated spots multifariously intersected by the black crags. There is scarcely room for larger villages among these rocks; few, indeed, could find sustenance among them. The villages consist of single and small rows of houses stretching along at a great distance, yet, bearing the same name, however, to a certain extent. The plain of Kasinqar ended with a beautiful group of palms. Then we entered the district of Kû’eh, followed by the long tract of Hamdab, to which belongs the island of Mérui or Méroe, more than a quarter of an hour in length. Here, too, the name is explained by the situation. It is very high, sometimes forty feet above the water-level; the one now among the larger islands is wholly barren and uninhabited, and excepting the black crags periodically washed by the waters, it is completely white. This is occasioned principally by the dazzling sand-drifts which cover it; but strangely enough, the rocks jutting out of the sand are also white, either from the broad veins of quartz, in the same manner as another peculiar white rock which I had seen in the province of Robatât, lying on the way, and which was called by the camel-drivers Hager Mérui, or because the weather-beaten granite here has contracted this colour. The name of the village of Méraui, near Barkal, has, perhaps, the same origin; here the white precipices, running from Méraui to the river, and which attracted my attention on our departure, have suggested the name by their colour. On the opposite shore the Gebel Kongêli, comes near to the river, also called Gebel Mérui; from the island as well as the rushing cataract a little above the island, which has received the name of Shellâl Mérui.