which join the Nile again at the rainy season, and testify to the changeableness of the course of the river, whose waters formed at one time a large lake at the foot of this mountain, and still do so at high water. No city, therefore, could have stood here, and still less on the little summit of the mountain, where also not a single fragment speaks in favour of the previous existence of Tokuls, although the mountain would have afforded the most splendid building materials to a nation, that had even only attained a moderate degree of cultivation. I knew already that we should find no ruins here, for the so-called ruins were said to consist of _top_, or bricks; and the fragments of stone have a great similarity to bricks, but only at the first superficial glance. The Turks, however, had taken these stones for bricks, and their fiery imagination pictured immediately pyramids, fortresses, and tombs; which assumption appeared more credible to me, because by embracing it and believing in such an existence, I hoped to be able to trace out, whether the cultivation of the Ethiopians travelled up or down the river. After a few glances, however, at the upper valley of the White Nile, I was soon persuaded, that Defafaùngh only remained as a _ne plus ultra_, an ever-interesting boundary-mark of the cultivated western Ethiopia. The prospect from the top presented to us some Dinka villages towards S., and a distant chain of mountains to S.E., and another to E. These seem also to lie isolated in the immeasurable plain, from the waters of which they might have stood forth, at one time, like islands. We saw the dung of hyænas and antelopes; and thousands of guinea-fowls enticed us to descend by a steep path on the south-eastern side, where the earlier volcanic phenomena were seen. I scrambled down, whilst the others were shooting, whom my huntsmen had followed by spontaneous impulse; twice I aimed and fired, but my gun flashed in the pan, and I had no more caps. I was therefore obliged to let the birds, driven up from below by Suliman Kashef’s Turks, fly round my head, or rise under my feet to the number of fifty to one hundred head, without even being able to kill them by throwing stones, or treading them to death. I thought _habeat sibi_, and wandered over the numberless wild paths, intersecting one another, between thorns and long straw, to the nearest reach of the mountain, which is only slightly elevated towards it in N.E., but of equal height to its base. Up rose a flock of guinea-fowls here, another covey alighted there; they jumped up and run on all sides to hide themselves, or flew to the slopes of the mountain, where they were received by the soldiers standing above, with a discharge from their terrible weapons, which perhaps they had never heard before. Some of the birds smelling powder, who were in the neighbouring copsewood, called the others in vain to leave the circuit of their hitherto Zion.