Page:Travels to Discover the Source of the Nile - In the Years 1768, 1769, 1770, 1771, 1772, and 1773 volume 4.djvu/545

Rh flowers, while the fun returned over the zenith, but still looking very poorly. At half past twelve we arrived at Suakem, under trees, near a sakia. At four o'clock in the afternoon we left Suakem, the mountains of Gerri bearing N. E. of us, and, five miles further, alighted in a wood near the Arabs Abdelab.

On the 30th, at five o'clock in the morning we left this station, and after having gone eight miles N. E. we came to a village, which is, as it were, the suburb of Gerri. The Acaba of Gerri is a low ridge of rocks that seems first to run from both fides across the bed of the river, as if designed to flop it ; and it is impossible to look at the gap through which it falls down below, without thinking that this passage was made by the Nile itself when first it began to flow. Gerri is built on a rising ground, consisting of white, barren sand and gravel, intermixed with white alabaster like pebbles, which, in a bright fun, are extremely disagrceable to the eye. It consifts of about 140 houses, none of them above one storey high, neat, well built, flat-roofed, and all of one height, composed with the same coloured earth as that on which it Hands, and, for this reason, it is scarcely vislble at a distance. It is immediately at the foot of the Acaba, something more than a quarter of a mile from the Nile. Gerri is situated at the end of the tropical rains, in lat. 16° 15′, and the Acaba seems to answer those mountains of Ptolemy, beyond which (that is to the N.) he says it is, that is, a country full of sand and without rain; it is but a small spot immediately on the Nile, which is all cultivated, as it enjoys the double advantage both of the overflowing of the river and the accidental