The breadth of the current amounts generally here to about five hundred paces; its reed-lakes are always at the side. At half-past two o’clock we move slowly S.S.E. with the north wind, which has nearly died away, and set to work with the oars. We are glad that it is a north wind, thinking that it may become constant before the end of this month. Four o’clock. What Fadl said three hours ago is confirmed even now, inasmuch as I see from the deck the right shore more than a quarter of an hour distant, though I am not able from the cabin to look over the reeds. The palms stand here in graceful rows, and satisfy the wandering eye in search of something to rest upon; an isolated dhellèb is also seen far up the river. We sail W. by S., and a skirt of trees with some dhellèbs behind approaches us, but is lost soon again in the distance to S.W. There is nothing to be distinguished on the left shore. Ant-hills are visible in the reeds, among which, in spite of their fresh green, there are dry spots. On the right shore we noticed a giraffe and twenty elephants, the latter teazed in an impudently friendly manner by white birds, against whom they tossed up their trunks: their tormentors, however, always returned to their heads and high backs, in order to pick the ticks out of their thick skins, like the crows on the pigs in Greece. They appear to me to be the very same birds we saw in Egypt perched on cows and camels. When the last-named animals have old wounds on their backs, they are visited by birds of prey. I was never allowed to shoot them, because the Arabs believe that they pick out _only_ the tainted flesh, and even contribute to heal the wounds, when the unmerciful cauterization of these people proves ineffectual. Mariàn shewed me some trees, of singular shape, having a corolla like that of a cactus. They are called _Shudder el Simm_, or poison-trees. On the left bank of the river I saw fourteen miserable tokuls upon the partly dried up morass, projecting between the reeds, and various iron pots lying about. They had the usual pointed roof of straw or halfa; the lower wall of reeds was plastered over with morass. Judging from this plaster, which had fallen off three feet high from the earth, the water had only risen here four feet, reckoning the height of the island at a foot. This, the highest water-line, had not been able to carry away an old thatched roof of some four feet high, and six feet diameter.