This formula is sung without intermission, in funeral ceremonies, keeping time to the trot, rather than to the walk of the bearers of the corpse. It is a formula which every traveller here should remark; although I, for my part, have never made use of it, except for a joke with my brother, when he or I lay sick in bed of a fever, and desponding. As the apothecary Bartoli, in Khartùm, a year ago, repeated directly before his death this formula, as a piece of wit which happened to be his last words, the Muslíms, who were present, wanted to carry him immediately to their churchyard, and to return thanks to God for having enlightened him with the true belief. Kurshid Basha ordered Saghiës to be built here, at his own cost, for the Hejazi; but the scaffolding for them is only to be seen now. I believe, from the various traces of earlier and extensive agriculture, to which these heights owe indeed their irriguous formation, that the fragments of bricks and the potsherds I had just found, belonged to an earlier city, which had fallen to ruin, or been destroyed, and which perhaps stood on the site of the old churchyard. The hill, about thirty feet high, being so close to the water, must have invited a settlement at a very early time. It is clearly perceptible that the water by the river-side has carried away a good deal of the hill. This may have been sufficient cause, for the inhabitants of the city, to desert it entirely. It is true that the soil is here also dark in its lower strata; but it is, however, very strongly alloyed with sand, and has but little resemblance to the greasy and slimy soil of Lower Egypt, and even to the shore of the blue Nile. The process of fecundation in the inundations of the Nile, consists indeed in the vegetable remains of the neighbouring forests, and abundant marsh-plants, which have been washed away, settling and depositing themselves afterwards as a humus, when they have been amalgamated by continual rotation with particles of clay and sand from the dark yellow Nile water, till they become a liquid pap. On the shores of the White Stream the woods are too near, and therefore their fallen leaves are carried away before the vegetable process can have properly taken place. For this reason I account for the fertility being so much less in proportion. After all, I believe that the Blue river is the real parent of Egyptian fertility, and that there was more; before the Dam, thrown up by it on the right ride, prevented it from carrying away also the leaves from the eastern forests. The Atbara and the smaller influxes of the right shore of the blue Nile above, still remain perfect canals of fecundity; and it is plainly seen by their darker colour that they separate at high-water.