Page:Travels to Discover the Source of the Nile - In the Years 1768, 1769, 1770, 1771, 1772, and 1773 volume 1.djvu/315

Rh with equal reason, he might have called every mile Saiel, from the Gulf of Suez to the line.

see this abuse in the old Itineraries, especially in the * Antonine, from such a town to such a town, so many miles; and what is the next station? (el seggera) ten miles. This el seggera †, the Latin readers take to be the name of a town, as Harduin, and all commentators on the classics, have done. But so far from Seggera signifying a town, it imports just the contrary, that there is no town there, but the traveller must be obliged to take up his quarters under a tree that night, for such is the meaning of Seggera as a station, and so likewise of Saiel.

the foot of the mountain, or about seven yards up from the base of it, are five pits or shafts, none of them four feet in diameter, called the Zumrud Wells, from which the ancients are said to have drawn the emeralds. We were not provided with materials, and little endowed with inclination, to descend into any one of them, where the air was probably bad. I picked up the nozzels, and some fragments of lamps, like those of which we find millions in Italy: and some worn fragments, but very small ones, of that brittle green chrystal, which is the fiberget and bilur of Ethiopia, perhaps the zumrud, the smaragdus described by Pliny, but by no means the emerald, known since the discovery of the new world, whose first character absolute- ly