I took care to promise him another present on the occasion of our leaving Farree, as I conceived that it might be some expectation of the sort that was operating to cause our tiresome detention. I was wrong in this, for it was not his pleasure, but the King’s, his master, that we should be kept at Farree, although he tried to make us believe it was his own, and assuming an authority that did not belong to him, made our confinement more irksome than it needed to have been, on purpose to evince his power. With our sentinels behind us, however, we could wander all over the hill of Farree, and we accordingly amused ourselves by endeavouring to extend our information upon the various subjects of novel interest with which we were surrounded. One observation I cannot do better than to insert here, respecting the rocks and soil of Farree, which abound with the nitrate of potass, the bald face of the former, in many places, being hollowed into deep grooves by the constant attrition of the tongues of the numerous flocks and herds, which seem to be as fond of this salt as the same animals are of common table salt in other countries; a circumstance that is well shown in those saline resorts of deer and buffaloes, called the “licks” of North America. The geological structure of the hills in this neighbourhood is a finely-grained trachytic rock; grey, save where the intrusion of narrow dykes of some blacker rocks, a few feet in thickness, and evidently heated on their first appearance, has changed the general colour to a deep red, which gradually recovers its natural hue at the distance of some yards on either side the dyke. This rock contains a considerable quantity of decomposing felt-spar, supplying the potass, and, I presume, deriving from the atmosphere, and the moisture it contains, the other necessary elements to form the thick efflorescence of saltpetre that covers in some places the surface of the rock. The religion of Farree is exclusively Mahomedan, as is also that of more than three-fourths of the towns and villages of the province of Efat, all of which are under the hereditary viceregal Wallasmah, who boasts a descent from the famous Mahomed Grahnè, the Adal conqueror of many portions of the ancient Abyssinian empire, in the sixteenth century. Efat forms a portion of the valley country, or Argobbah, which extends from the edge of the table land of Shoa to the Hawash, that flows along the base of this slope, from the south towards the north. The northern boundary of Efat is the river Robee, the southern one being the Kabani; both of them flow into the Hawash.