The annual overflow of the Nile is now well known to proceed from the heavy periodical rains within the tropics. They fall in copious torrents upon the great plateau of Abyssinia, which rises, like a fortress, 6000 feet above the burning plains with which it is surrounded on every side, attracting the clouds, cold fogs, and tremendous showers, enveloping An Rober, the capital, while, whenever the curtain of mist is withdrawn, the strange contrast is presented of the sulphureous plains, visible below, where the heat is 90°, and the drought excessive. A peculiar character has been given to this district by the violence of the periodical rains. Bruce speaks of the mountains of this table-land, not remarkable for their height, but for their number and uncommon forms. “Some of them are flat, thin, and square, in shape of a hearth-stone or slab, that scarce would seem to have base sufficient to resist the winds. Some are like pyramids, others like obelisks or prisms, and some, the most extraordinary of all, pyramids pitched upon their points, with their base uppermost.” Mr. Salt confirms this delineation in the main. The peculiar shapes referred to have been formed by the action of the torrents discharged from the clouds, which have, for ages, been skeletonizing the country, dismantling the granite with its kindred masses of the softer deposits, gradually wearing away also these harder rocks, and carrying along the soil of Ethiopia, strewing it upon the valley of the Nile, to the shores of the Mediterranean. When Bruce was ascending Taranta, a sudden noise was heard on the heights louder than the loudest thunder, and, almost directly afterward, a river, the channel of which had been dry, came down in a stream several feet in depth, and as broad as the whole bed. Hence the steeple and obelisk form of the rocks, with their naked aspect--which has, not unaptly, been compared to bones stripped of their flesh.