On the 26th, at six o’clock in the morning, we left Dagashaha. Our road was through a plain and level country, but, to appearance, desolated and uninhabited, being overgrown with high bent grass and bushes, as also destitute of water. We passed the solitary village Adega, three miles on our left, the only one we had seen. At eight o’clock we came to the brink of a prodigious valley, in the bottom of which runs the Tacazzè, next to the Nile the largest river in Upper Abyssinia. It rises in Angot (at least its principal branch) in a plain champain country, about 200 miles S. E. of Gondar, near a spot called Souami Midre. It has three spring heads, or sources, like the Nile; near it is the small village Gourri[14]. Angot is now in possession of the Galla, whose chief, Guangoul, is the head of the western Galla, once the most formidable invader of Abyssinia. The other branch of the Tacazzé rises in the frontiers of Begemder, near Dabuco; whence, running between Gouliou, Lasta, and Belessen, it joins with the Angot branch, and becomes the boundary between Tigré and the other great division of the country called Amhara. This division arises from language only, for the Tacazzé passes nowhere near the province of Amhara; only all to the east of the Tacazzè is, in this general way of dividing the country, called Tigrè, and all to the westward, from the Tacazzé to the Nile, Gojam, and the Agows, is called Amhara, because the language of that province is there spoken, and not that of Tigré or Geez. But I would have my reader on his guard against the belief that no languages but these two are spoken in these divisions; many different dialects are spoken in little districts in both, and, in some of them, neither the language of Tigrè nor that of Amhara is understood.