The women seldom marry after sixteen; we saw several with child, who they said were not eleven years old. Yet I did not observe that the men were less in size, less vigorous and active in body, than in other places. This, one would not imagine from the appearance these young wives make. They are little better coloured than a corpse, and look older at sixteen, than many English women at sixty, so that you are to look for beauty here in childhood only. Achmim appears to be the Panopolis of the ancients, not only by its latitude, but also by an inscription of a very large triumphal arch, a few hundred yards south of the convent. It is built with marble by the Emperor Nero, and is dedicated in a Greek inscription, ΠΑΝΙ ΘΕΩ. The columns that were in its front are broken and thrown away; the arch itself is either sunk into the ground, or overturned on the side, with little separation of the several pieces. The 24th of December we left Achmim, and came to the village Shekh Ali on the west, two miles and a quarter distant. We then passed Hamdi, about the same distance farther south; Aboudarac and Salladi on the east; then Salladi Garbieh, and Salladi Shergieh on the east and west, as the names import; and a number of villages, almost opposite, on each side of the river. At three o’clock in the afternoon we arrived at Girgé, the largest town we had seen since we left Cairo; which, by the latitude Ptolemy has very rightly placed it in, should be the Diospolis Parva, and not Gawa, as Mr Norden makes it. For this we know is the beginning of the Diospolitan nome, and is near a remarkable crook of the Nile, as it should be. It is also on the western side of the river, as Diospolis was, and at a proper distance from Dendera, the ancient Tentyra, a mark which cannot be mistaken. The Nile makes a kind of loop here; is very broad, and the current strong. We passed it with a wind at north; but the waves ran high as in the ocean. All the country, on both sides of the Nile, to Girgé, is but one continued grove of palm-trees, in which are several villages a small distance from each other, Doulani, Consaed, Deirout, and Berdis, on the west side; Welled Hallifi, and Beni Haled, on the east. The villages have all a very picturesque appearance among the trees, from the many pigeon-houses that are on the tops of them. The mountains on the east begin to depart from the river, and those on the west to approach nearer it. It seems to me, that, soon, the greatest part of Egypt on the east side of the Nile, between Achmim and Cairo, will be desert; not from the rising of the ground by the mud, as is supposed, but from the quantity of sand from the mountains, which covers the mould or earth several feet deep. This 24th of December, at night, we anchored between two villages, Beliani and Mobanniny.