The remainder of the journey was soon completed, and in the early morning hours of the 22nd of February we found ourselves at the Meshera, the landing-place of all who resort to the Gazelle. This place is marked in the maps as Port Rek, called so from the Rek, a section of the Dinka. These Rek people were the first allies among the natives that the new comers had acquired, and they had been accustomed to provide them with bearers long before the Khartoom merchants had established any settlements in the interior. Deducting the days on which we had not proceeded, our boats had taken thirty days in going from Khartoom to the Meshera. I had been anxious to make a good investigation of the river banks; otherwise the voyage might easily be accomplished in twenty days. Above the mouth of the Dyoor, so difficult of access, the deep channel is continued for a space of sixteen miles, when it forms the _cul-de-sac_ which I have mentioned: there is not the least current when the waters are all at their height; but in March and April there may at some places be observed a retrograde motion of the stream. It is manifestly an ancient bed of the Dyoor, or of some river which in the lapse of time has changed its course. It is not easy to explain it, but the stream seemed to me, as I think I could farther demonstrate, the navigable overflow of some inland liman, that is, the receptacle of a number of considerable rivulets meeting together, something like what the delta of the Canton river would be, if it could be levelled, filled up, and carried away inland. The uniform depth of the channel might seem to originate in some freak in the conformation of the ground, or of the masses of vegetation, which are irregularly scattered about; but really it is only an indication of a condition of things long passed away, when the mainstream flowed through better defined and more contracted borders.