Immediately upon the bank opposite to Gondar, on the other side of the river, is a large town of Mahometans of about a thousand houses. These are all active and laborious people; great part of them are employed in taking care of the king’s and nobility’s baggage and field-equipage, both when they take the field and when they return from it. They pitch and strike their tents with surprising facility and expedition; they load and conduct the mules and the baggage, and are formed into a body under proper officers, but never suffered, nor do they chuse, to fight on either side. Gondar, by a number of observations of the sun and stars made by day and night, in the course of three years, with an astronomical quadrant of three feet radius, and two excellent telescopes, and by a mean of all their small differences, is in lat. 12° 34´ 30´´; and by many observations of the satellites of Jupiter, especially the first, both in their immersions and emersions during that period, I concluded its longitude to be 37° 33´ 0´´ east from the meridian of Greenwich. It was the 4th of April 1770, at eight o’clock in the morning, when I set out from Gondar. We passed the Kahha, and the Mahometan town, and, about ten in the morning, we came to a considerable river called the Mogetch, which runs in a deep, rugged bed of flakey blue stones. We crossed it upon a very solid, good bridge of four arches, a convenience seldom to be met with in passing Abyssinian rivers, but very necessary on this, as, contrary to most of their streams, which become dry, or stand in pools, on the approach of the sun, the Mogetch runs constantly, by reason that its sources are in the highest hills of Woggora, where clouds break plentifully at all seasons of the year. In the rainy months it rolls a prodigious quantity of water into the lake Tzana, and would be absolutely unpassable to people bringing provision to the market, were it not for this bridge built by Facilidas; yet it is not judiciously placed, being close to the mountain’s foot, in the face of a torrent, where it runs strongest, and carries along with it stones of a prodigious size, which luckily, as yet, have injured no part of the bridge. The water of the river Mogetch is not wholesome, probably from the minerals, or stony particles it carries along with it, and the slatey strata over which it runs. We have many rivers of this quality in the Alps, especially between mount Cenis and Grenoble.