Up to this time we had ridden along the boundary of the ancient lake, and the adjoining region. This was bare and unfruitful, because the land now lies so high, that it cannot be inundated. The land, however, immediately enclosing the old lake, forms by far the most beautiful and fertile part of the Faiûm. This we now traversed, leaving the metropolis of the province, Medînet el Faiûm, with the hills of ancient Crocodilopolis, to our left, and riding by Selajîn and Fidimîn to Agamîeh, where we staid for the night. Next morning we arrived by way of Bisheh on the frontier of the uninterrupted garden land. Here we entered a new region, particularly striking by its unfertility and desolateness, which lies round the other like a girdle, and separates it from the deepest, and most distant, crescent-shaped Birqet el Qorn. About noon we reached the lake. The only bark we could possibly find here, carried us in an hour and a half over the waters, surrounded on all sides by desert, to an island in the middle of the lake, called Gezîret el Qorn. However, we found nothing remarkable upon it, not a single trace of building: towards evening we returned back again. On the following morning, we cruized in a more northerly direction across the lake, and landed on a little peninsula on the opposite side, that rises immediately to a _plateau_ of the Libyan desert, one hundred and fifty feet high, commanding the whole oasis. Thither we ascended and found, about an hour distant from the shores, in the middle of the inhospitable water and barren desert, the extended ruins of an ancient city, which is called in earlier maps Medînet Nimrud. Of this name no one knew anything; the place was known as Diméh. Next morning, the 7th of July, the regular plan of these ruins, with the remains of their temple was made by Erbkam, who had stopped the night here with Abeken. The temple bears no inscription, and what we found of sculptures point to the late origin of this remarkable site. Its purpose can only have been a military station against Libyan incursions into the rich Faiûm. On the 8th of July we went in our boat to Qasr Qerûn, an old city at the southern end of the lake, with a temple, in excellent preservation, but bearing no inscriptions of recent date, the plan of which was taken next day. Hence we pursued the southern boundary of the oasis by Neslet, to the ruins of Medînet Mâdi at lake Gharaq, in the neighbourhood of which the old embankments of Lake Mœris run down from the north, and we arrived in our camp at the ruins of the labyrinth, on the 11th of July. We found all well except our Frey, whom we had left indisposed, and whose recurring, seemingly climatic, illness gives me some pain.