Habesh might have been the real mother country of Nubia and Egypt, by means of the fecundation brought from Asia. Nuba negroes mixed with the whites, and became masters of the country, until they were forced back to their mountains in Kordofàn,—still remaining a pure race, and nothing being left of the whole Egyptian policy but circumcision. The black nation on the Nile might have been separated from that in Habesh by a cordon; and both of these tribes preferred, on cultivation increasing, a comfortable life in the city to the free one in the mountains, until the Romans connected again Habesh and Egypt, and built Axum. The shores of the Sobàt have hitherto been without wood; but I saw, upon the shore behind the island just left by us, a row of trees, said to be Döbkers, and probably were so; for I recognised the little solitary shrubs, in which I and my servants had groped about till late at night, to be young shoots of Döbkers, which seem to have sprung up this year at high-water; and also nebek and telle. I found water-thistles on the shore above in unusual abundance, and collected also that clay which appeared to me previously to be a layer of stone. It was not quite free from fine sand, which the water had washed on the shore, and exhibited, therefore, a rough, stone surface, without being so yet. But where it lay piecemeal about the shore it was as hard and black as stone saturated with water, and dried or burnt by the sun, for that luminary has the power, with the assistance of rain, of vitrifying rocks; and we have seen ourselves such greenish ridges and blocks in the Nubian deserts. According to Girard, the specimens I brought from the shores of the Sobàt consist of a micaceous sand, dark-brown, ochrous clay, chalky sand, and partly of a conglomerate composed of small fragments of limestone baked together by the sun. The sand, where it is pure, consists of several little yellowish grains of quartz, a small portion of reddish feldspar, some brown iron-stone, little brown tombac-mica, and a black mineral consisting of small grains, the nature of which could not be exactly ascertained. These materials indicate that the origin of the sand is derived from a mica-slate and gneiss mountain not far distant; for if the sand were far from the mountain whence it originated, it would not contain coloured mica.