Towards evening cartridges were served out, and muskets loaded, for we are now, for the first time, in a hostile country! The powder-room stood open, and the men with lighted pipes passed continually to and fro unrestrained, over the open hatchway. Allah kerim! I seek to rouse my captain from his indolence by drawing comparisons, every moment, with the English sea-service,—I fall asleep myself whilst the powder is being distributed, and waking early in the morning, find the hatchway still open, and the sentinel, whose duty it was to give an alarm as soon as the water increased in the hold, fast asleep, with the pipe in his hand, and his musket in his lap. Feïzulla Capitan begged me not to report the poor devil (el meszkin). The upper strata of the ground here are sandy and but little fertile, yet I sometimes sank so deep into water and the livid clay soil that my red shoes stuck fast. Beyond the gently elevated margin of the shore, the ground is flat and bare, with short grass and stunted copsewood, among which the wood usually made for tobacco-pipe tubes in Sennaar, with its light grey rind, oblong-shaped leaves and truncated at the top, is particularly abundant, and very much in request with the crew. The height of the water here was, owing to the great breadth of the inundation, not near so much as further downwards. In Khartùm, where the bed of the river on _both_ sides is contracted by the sides of the shores, it must have been twice as high at this time. The whole inclination of the ground in the territory of the White Stream, sinks from E. to W. The Nile is the best hydrometer for this observation, for I have frequently remarked that the islands in the neighbourhood of the right shore are generally less inundated than those on the left; therefore, in the former, the greater elevation of the eastern bank still continues. An observation also, which I made on the plains of Meroë, or rather on the enormous plain between the Atbara and the Blue Stream, contributes to strengthen this opinion of mine with respect to the slope of the land from E. to W. It can be plainly remarked there that the rain-water runs off westward, without paying any attention to the direction of the current of the Nile, as its boundaries are now defined by its mountains and high shores. But now the question is: If my hypothesis of the inclination of these parts from E. to W. is generally correct, what has induced the Nile to take a course diverging from it?