We proceeded along the narrow arid winding path, that leads down the steep western slope of the rock of Aliu Amba. Here the road is deeply worn in the hard stone, so as to form a kind of hollow way, upon each bank of which thick bushes of a large strong-leaved plant, meeting above the head of the traveller, forms an umbrageous tunnel, nearly impervious to the sun’s rays. At the bottom of the descent we crossed a stream, yellow with suspended earth, for, like most other rivers of Shoa, during the wet season, its running water is an active agent of denudation. We now slowly ascended the opposite bank of the valley, and passing through the little Christian village upon its summit, called Aitess, we then again descended to the level of another stream, along whose miry banks, crossing and re-crossing it several times in its tortuous course, we at length reached, where, in a narrow cascade, the water falls suddenly the distance of two hundred feet, with the usual rushing din of an impetuous torrent. Here the bald face of a rock, across which not the trace of a road could be perceived, projected a smooth surface of compact stone, from beneath a super stratum of a loose schistose formation of several hundred feet high, whilst below us appeared an almost perpendicular wall, with just such a sliding inclination as suggested an idea of the bridge said to be situated by some Orientalists between heaven and earth, for there required scarcely the impetus of a wish, to have slipped from life to death during the walk across. The earthquake that ushered in the rains had occasioned this obliteration of the road, for the effects of some thousands of tons of the overlying detritus which had been detached, with bare skeleton branches of overturned trees protruding amongst the ruins, were visible over the devastated fields of vetches and horse-beans that occupied the bottom of the large valley into which we had opened, where the stream we had previously kept along, fell over the waterfall into this the bed of the principal tributary of the Dinkee river. This fallen earth, scattered far and wide, had converted the green appearance of large tracts of cultivated lands, with the crops far advanced, to the condition and character of a freshly ploughed fallow.