The next morning we landed first in Tanqássi, about the distance of an hour and a half from Abu Dôm, where we were to find ruins. The Fakir Daha, who belonged to the Korêsh, the tribe of the Prophet, accompanied us to the now inconsiderable mounds of bricks. We passed by his hereditary tomb, a little cupola building erected by his grandfather, which already had not only received him, but also his father and several other relations. From hence I espied some hills in the distance, which the Fakir declared to be natural. Nevertheless we rode up to them, and found, at about half an hour’s distance from the river, more than twenty tolerably large pyramids, now apparently formed of nothing but black mud, but originally built of Nile bricks. Single stones lay round about, and on the east side, at some distance, there were always two little heaps of stones, which appeared to have belonged to a kind of ante-chamber, and perhaps were connected with the pyramid by brick walls. Nowhere, however, were there any hewn stones or inscriptions to be found. On the opposite shore, near Kurru, we also found a field of pyramids, but very few ruins of towns were to be discovered. The largest of the two most considerable pyramids, named Quntûr, was about thirty-five feet high, and towards the south-east were the remains of an antechamber. Around these two were grouped twenty-one smaller ones, of which four, like the largest pyramid, were built entirely of sandstone, but are now mostly in ruins; others consisted only of black basalt. Finally, westward of all the ground plan of a large apparently quite massive and consequently completely ruined pyramid was to be seen, whose foundation was in the rock. It appears also that this pyramid, which by its solid architecture was distinguished from all the surrounding ones, belonged to a royal dynasty of Napata; thus it was easier to account for the want of city ruins here than on the opposite side. Three quarters of an hour down the stream on the right, lies the little village of Zûma. Near it, towards the mountains, rises an old fortress, with towers of defence, called Kárat Négil, the outer walls of which were ruined and destroyed about fifty or sixty years ago, when the present inhabitants of Zûma settled here. The name is derived from that of an old king of the country, called Négil, in whose time the surrounding land, which is now barren, was still reached and fertilized by the Nile. The first discovery on the road to the fortress was another number of pyramids, of which eight were yet about twenty feet high; including the ruined ones, which seemed to have been as usual the most massive, there were altogether thirty; to the south-west the old quarries are yet to be seen, which had furnished the materials for the pyramids.