Besides some pretty platted mats, we found here larger and more beautiful clay vessels, in the form of the Burma, than in Sennaar. They were extraordinarily light, and of a black colour, for the slimy clay there, piled up in strata, and kneaded together into balls, as thick as the fist, displayed a dark colour, and must undergo an excessive cleansing before being used for that purpose. As there are no stones here, between which meal can be ground, they make use of a murhàka of clay, a plate three or four fingers thick, blunted at the four corners, having a rough, solid crust, and on which they grind their corn off hand with an artificial stone. In the land of Sudan they use for a murhàka a block of granite, presenting above a flat surface, so that the corn poured on it, by handfuls, rolls off neither to the right nor to the left. A female slave kneeling triturates the corn to a meal, with an oval stone, which she holds in both hands. From the sloping position of the granite block, this meal runs off, and is received in a piece of leather or cloth, laid under this simple mill. I saw a Murhàka of this form in the Museum at Berlin. These last-mentioned stones are found on the Island of Rügen, and have a hole in the middle, owing to the continual rubbing, exactly as we see in Inner Africa. This grinding is a very troublesome process, and the arms of the poor creatures condemned to it acquire an unusual form. As bread is the mainstay in these lands, in the form of flat cakes, often as fine and thin as wafers, a slave can only make meal for eight persons, if she works from morning to evening; and this is even taken as a standard. Besides that murhàka of clay, which is mixed with slime and roots, although the pure blue clay lies at a small depth, I saw also large broken mortars in the earth, made of the very same materials. In order to repair these, they make a hole in the ground, smearing the inside with clayey thick slime, and light a fire in it, when the mortars become as smooth and dark as if they were made of cast iron. A pestle of hard wood is used to prepare an oil from the simsin and garrua (_ricinus_).