I have already sufficiently dwelt upon the ancient history, the names, manners, and people that inhabit the banks of this river. It was the Siris (or river of the dog-star) whilst that negro, uncivilized people, the Cushites of the island of Meroë, resided upon its banks. It was then called the Tan-nush Abay, or the lesser of two rivers that swelled with the tropical rains, which was the name the peasants, or unlearned, gave it, from comparison with the Nile. It was the Tacazzè in Derkin or the dwelling of the Taka, before it joined the Nile in Beja, and it was the Astaboras of those of the ancients that took the Nile for the Siris. It is now the Atbara, giving its name to that peninsula, which it incloses on the east as the Nile does on the west, and which was formerly the island of Meroë; but it never was the Tekesel, as authors have called it, deriving the name from the Ethiopic word Taka, which undoubtedly signifies, fear, terror, distress, or sadness; I mean, this was never the derivation of its name. Far from this idea, our Tacazzé is one of the pleasantest rivers in the world, shaded with fine lofty trees, its banks covered with bushes inferior in fragrance to no garden in the universe; its stream is the most limpid, its water excellent, and full of good fish of great variety, as its coverts are of all sorts of game. It must be confessed, that, during the inundation, these things wear a contrary face. It carries in its bed near one-third of all the water that falls in Abyssinia; and we saw the mark the stream had reached the preceding year, eighteen feet above the bottom of the river, which we do not know was the highest point that it arrived at. But three fathoms it certainly had rolled in its bed; and this prodigious body of water, passing furiously from a high ground in a very deep descent, tearing up rocks and large trees in its course, and forcing down their broken fragments scattered on its stream, with a noise like thunder echoed from a hundred hills, these very naturally suggest an idea, that, from these circumstances, it is very rightly called the _terrible_. But then it must be considered, that all rivers in Abyssinia at the same time equally overflow; that every stream makes these ravages upon its banks; and that there is nothing in this that peculiarly affects the Tacazzè, or should give it this special name: at least, such is my opinion; though it is with great willingness I leave every reader in possession of his own, especially in etymology.