_Wednesday, October 9._—Our route led us over stony ground till we reached another favoured valley, called Tefárrakad, where, owing to the watercourse being divided into several branches, vegetation is spread over a larger space. Here, while our Kél-owí hung a little behind, two Imghád, mounted on camels, attached themselves to us and became rather troublesome; but they looked so famished and thin that they awakened pity rather than any other feeling, their dress and whole attire being of the poorest description. Further on, when we had left the valley and ascended rocky ground, we met a small caravan of the same mixed kind as our own troop—camels, bullocks, asses, and men on foot; they were returning to their village with provision of Negro millet, which they had bought in Ágades. We had scarcely advanced three miles when we descended again into another long, beautiful hollow in the rocky ground, the valley Bóghel, which, besides a fine grove of dúm-trees, exhibits one very large and remarkable specimen of the tree called baure[11] in Háusa, a large ficus with ample fleshy leaves of beautiful green. This specimen, so far to the north, measured not less than twenty-six feet in circumference at the height of eight feet from the ground, and was certainly eighty feet high, with a full, widespreading crown. I scarcely remember afterwards to have seen in all Sudán a larger baure than this. Here, for the first time, I heard the Guinea-fowl (“táliat” or “tailelt” in Temashight, “zabó” in Háusa); for I did not see it, the birds keeping to the thick and impenetrable underwood which filled the intervals between the dúm-trees. At noon the wood, which was rather more than half a mile in breadth, formed one continued and unbroken cluster of thicket, in the most picturesque state of wild luxuriance, while further on, where it became a little clearer of underwood, the ground was covered with a sort of wild melon; but my friend the blacksmith, who took up one of them and applied his teeth to it, threw it away with such a grimace that I rather suspect he mistook a colocynth, “jan-gunna,” for a melon, “gunna.” Numbers of the _Asclepias gigantea_, which never grows on a spot incapable of cultivation, bore testimony to the fertility of the soil, which was soon more clearly demonstrated by a small corn-field still under cultivation. Traces of former cultivation were evident on all sides. There can scarcely be the least doubt that these valleys, which were expressly left to the care of the degraded tribes or the Imghád, on condition of their paying from the produce a certain tribute to their masters, once presented a very different aspect; but when the power of the ruler of Ágades dwindled away to a shadow, and when the Imghád, who received from him their kaid or governor, “tágaza,” ceased to fear him, preferring robbery and pillage to the cultivation of the ground, these fine valleys were left to themselves, and relapsed into a wilderness.