The name of Sobàt could only have been given to this river by the Funghs, for the Arabs have never possessed it, and usually call it Bach’r el Makàda (river of Habesch.) The Dinkas name the White Stream Kedi, and _this_ Kiti, which mostly denotes water in the dialects on the White Stream up to Bari, where it is called Kirboli: Kir also means water among the tribes down the river. Its name is Tilfi and Tak with the Nuèhrs and Shilluks. When I view the steep and high slope of the shores of the Sobàt, and the proportionate thin layer of earth on the immovable strata of clay or original soil, which here is twenty to twenty-five feet higher than on the shore or in the bed of the Nile, I return to my former conviction, that the immeasurable particles of stone and plants stream by means of the breach, and flowing away of the lakes of the Ethiopian highlands, to the lake of the basin-shaped valley of the White Stream which flows off with the Nile, as the deepest point; and that all the lower country under the mountain chains of Fàzogl and Habesch, from the Atbara to the land of Bari must be under water, if it be not a lake connected with the depressed regions of the White Stream. If the lakes, therefore, of that lofty plain were torn by a powerful catastrophe, and deserted their chasms or valleys, as the water-basins of Switzerland did formerly—(even now there are lakes or flat valleys, signs of a deluge, in which the waters might have dashed from the summit of Atlas to the top of the Alps)—there is no question that the lower lakes or valleys must have filled and overflowed. The first rushing-down of the mass of waves, incredibly violent as it must have been, the falling of mountains accompanying it, and their washing-away, overpowered everything below them, as if gods had descended from Olympus, and no longer recognized those limits that would have remained eternal obstacles by an inferior shock. The first deposit was a layer of clay on the side of the Sobat, whilst the White Stream suffered no such sediment when in its primitive strength, and washed away everything that it could seize, as is shewn by the far lower shores. The high shores of the Sobàt and its environs fall away, especially towards the level parts of the left side of the Nile, to which the accumulated slime could still less arrive owing to the stream carrying it off, although several gohrs and rivers from thence pour into it. These afford water certainly, but no slime to increase the height of the shore, as we plainly see by the Gazelle River, and also in the little Kiti of the Jengähs called Njin-Njin. We must assume from the Dinka country and its greater elevation, that the ground towards the Nile was heightened formerly by its gohrs flowing from above, or perhaps constant rivers; whilst Kordofàn, which lies over the left shore of the Nile, discharges no rivers, and its oases have run down from the mountains themselves, and formed islands in the sands