The earliest depression to be discovered bearing the name of _Bahr bela ma_ was the one now known as the Wadi Faregh (the “empty wadi”), situated immediately south of the Wadi Natrun. Father Sicard, who visited the place in 1712, correctly interpreted the Arabic name to mean literally “sea without water,” and having discovered fossil trees there, which he imagined to be the petrified remains of masts of ships, he inferred that a narrow arm of the sea formerly extended from the Mediterranean into the locality.[6] At a later date Sicard’s view that the petrified trees were the masts of ships was recognized to be a mistaken one; but a greater error was committed by changing the translation of _Bahr bela ma_ from “sea without water” into “river without water,” as was done by D’Anville in his ‘Mémoires sur l’Egypte,’ published at Paris in 1766. D’Anville was a great authority in his day, and his translation was adopted by subsequent writers for over a hundred years. General Andreossi, who commanded Napoleon’s artillery in the expedition of 1798 and 1799, made a map of the “Dry River” and the “Valley of the Natron Lakes,” in which both depressions are shown open at both ends, instead of being closed in as they really are. Andreossi considered that the “Bahr bela ma” was the dry bed of an ancient branch of the Nile, which left the present Nile Valley somewhere in Middle Egypt and entered the sea to the west of Alexandria; he also thought that the ancient Lake Moeris was probably formed by the damming of the “dry river” near its supposed offtake from the Nile.[7] Later on, after Cailliaud and other early nineteenth-century travellers had discovered that other depressions existed in widely separated localities and bore the same Arabic name of _Bahr bela ma_, it seems to have been hastily assumed by the cartographers of the time that all the depressions bearing the same name were parts of a single dried-up river-channel. Thus, on a large map of Egypt compiled by Colonel Lapin and published at Paris in 1856, the “Bahar Belah-mah ou Fleuve sans eau” is stated to come from the Congo and is depicted as coursing through the Oasis of Dakhla, thence passing to the east of Baharia Oasis and on to the Mediterranean. On another large map of Egypt, compiled by Muzzi Bey, the then Director-General of Egyptian Posts, and published in Florence in 1876, a continuous valley is boldly shown leading from the mountains of Darfur to the Mediterranean, while cross-valleys, labelled “Old Bed of the Nile,” are depicted as connecting the main valley with that of the Nile at Korosko and Dongola. The Rohlfs expedition of 1874 proved that there was no such channel running northwards through Dakhla Oasis; that the “Bahr bela ma” which had been crossed by Cailliaud between Siwa and Baharia was merely a closed-in local depression, and that the continuous empty river-beds which were shown on the maps of that period had no real existence.[8]