therefore obstinately persist in what they consider to be error, when it has more the appearance of truth, than have the theories which they can only advance in opposition. The Abiah, which is almost denied to exist by one traveller, and taken into remote countries by another, I believe to be the main branch of the Gibbee, and have accordingly so laid it down in the sketch map of the different water-sheds of Abyssinia I have projected to assist me in explaining my ideas upon the subject. I will not, as I am almost tempted, recapitulate the evidences that the Gibbee, the Abiah, and the ancient Assabi, are one and the same river, and the principal branch of the Abyssinian Nile; for if that which I have said is not sufficient to convince; to continue would only be to fatigue the reader with suppositions, probabilities, and beliefs, that would still, in the end, leave the subject in quite as unsatisfactory a state as it remains at present. FOOTNOTES: [5] This individual figures in Major Harris’s “Highland of Ethiopia” as Hadjji Mahomed; and the whole occurrence there related happened during the journey to the coast in 1843. It is difficult, therefore, to understand how it could be recorded as an incident of a journey in 1841, and in an account stated to have been written in the heart of Abyssinia. Numerous other instances of this kind of interpolation of adventure could be pointed out which would be immaterial, only, as I shall probably allude to the same circumstances myself, of course I am anxious not to be supposed to borrow them from the work of a cotemporary. [6] By the old Portuguese writers denominated “the flower Denguelet.” [7] None of the _Egyptians_, or _Africans_, or _Grecians_, with whom I had any discourse, would own to me their knowledge of the fountains of the Nile, except only a scribe of the sacred treasury of Minerva, in the city _Sais_ in Egypt. He, indeed, cheerfully told me that he certainly was acquainted with them. But this was the account he gave, that there were two mountains, with peaked tops, situated between Syene, a city of Thebais, and Elephantina; the name of one of which was _Krophi_, of the other _Mophi_; that from the midst of these two mountains arose the bottomless fountains of the Nile; one part of its stream ran towards Egypt and the north, the other part towards Ethiopia and the south. But that the fountains were bottomless, he said that Psammeticus, a King of Egypt, had made the experiment; after having tied ropes of great length and let them down into the fountains, he could not reach the bottom.--_Herodotus_, book ii. CHAPTER VIII.