Ahmed Basha perceived all this very well, when we travelled together on the Nile to Tomaniàt below Halfaia, where he had taken the best fields from the Shaïgiës, in an illegal manner, and had ordered fifty sakies (or chain of buckets, for raising water) to be constructed upon it, and where the sesame was standing majestically, higher than a man, and might yet grow another foot. For this purpose—to obviate the danger which might arise to the future royal city—the bend of the right shore near Tuti was to have been broken by a deep canal, in order to carry away the sand from Hubba, and to deepen there the bed of the river. A favourite plan of the Basha’s, however, was to make his residence a fortress, to erect works on Tuti, and to place Khartùm upon an island by a canal, to be opened from the Blue to the White Nile; for such a canal formerly existed from Soba to the White Stream. Old people relate, to be sure, but only as a rumour, that the White and Blue Stream met together there. The ruins of Soba already known (which place one hears pronounced likewise Suba and Seba), consists of heaps of burnt bricks, without any other cement than the Nile slime, which have supplied the surrounding country for the vaults of the reputed holy Sheikhs, as well as in more modern times, Khartùm with materials for its mosque: they extend over a considerable space on the right shore of the Blue River. I heard the country opposite these ruins called likewise “Dar Soba;” therefore a contra-Soba, or perhaps once united to it, since the burnt and fused masses of brick, the wide-scattered bricks and fragments, even the ditches, if there had not been clay or foundations and vaults dug out, indicate, at all events, an old place. A small village on the edge of the river, under shady mimosas, and called Soba, extends to this. I have found just as slight traces of that canal, or of the bed of a river in this woody country, as in the other Soba on the right side of the river; and, therefore, I cannot assume, with regard to the last-mentioned ruins, that they were once situated on the land of Sennaar, although the right shore might indicate the violence of an irruption of water through the city itself.