Having engaged a Nile boat, or dahabeeyah, and two larger noggens or sailing barges, with an escort of forty armed men, and forty sailors, and accumulated four months’ supplies of provisions, Sir Samuel set sail from Khartûm on the 18th of December, 1862. On Christmas Day he was slowly ascending the river, the banks of which were fringed with immense forests. These trees are the soont (_Acacia Arabica_), which produce an excellent tannin; the fruit is used for that purpose, and yields a rich brown dye. The straight smooth trunks are thirty-five feet high, and about eighteen inches in diameter. When in full foliage they look well from a distance, but on a closer approach the forest is seen to be a desolate swamp, completely overflowed; “a mass of fallen dead trees protruding from the stagnant waters, a solitary crane perched here and there upon the rotten boughs; floating water-plants massed together, and forming green swimming islands, hitched generally among the sunken trunks and branches; sometimes slowly descending with the sluggish stream, bearing, spectre-like, storks thus voyaging on nature’s rafts to freer lands unknown.” This kind of scenery—depressing enough, no doubt—continues for a considerable distance, and so long as it lasts deprives the Nile of that romance with which it has been invested by the imagination of poets. There is neither beauty nor interest in it; and one is surprised to see the low flat banks studded with populous villages. The flooded plains, however, afford abundant pasture for the herds of the Shillooks, who in their choice of a locality are governed by considerations of utility, and not by the principles of æstheticism. The junction of the Sobat takes place in lat. 9° 21′. This tributary, at the point of confluence, is a hundred and twenty yards broad, and flows at the rate of two miles and a half per hour. Still the Nile valley presents the same characteristics—broad tracts of marsh and grasses; dull, monotonous levels, unrelieved by any vividness of colour. After receiving the Bahr-el-Ghazal, the White Nile turns abruptly to the south-east, and winds upward through a flat country, which, in the rainy season, is resolved into a system of extensive lakes. Its highway is half choked with floating vegetation, which nurtures innumerable clouds of mosquitoes. The people on its banks belong to the Nuehr tribe; the women pierce the upper lip, and wear an ornament about four inches long, of beads upon a iron wire, which projects like the horn of a rhinoceros. The men are both tall and robust, and armed with lances. They carry pipes that will hold nearly a quarter of a pound of tobacco; when the supply of “the weed” fails, they substitute charcoal.