of Egyptian Arch., vol. iv, p. 213; vol. v, p. 99; vol. vi, p. 247. At Nûri, or Nurri, 7 miles from Marawi, on the west bank of the Nile, are the remains of 35 pyramids, which probably formed the tombs of the kings and royal personages of Napata. These pyramids are better and more solidly built than any others which the writer has seen in the Sûdân, and in very few cases do their cores consist of anything besides well-hewn sandstone blocks laid in regular courses. Each pyramid had originally a chapel in front of its face on the south-east side, but every building of the kind has long since disappeared, and there is not an inscription or bas-relief visible by which any of them may be dated.

The Pyramids of Nûri at the foot of the Fourth Cataract.

As in the pyramid-field at Meroë and elsewhere in the Sûdân, the Pyramids of Nûri stand in a group on raised ground, which has the form of a crescent or rough horseshoe, with the opening facing the south. When the writer saw them in 1897 they were literally silted up with many hundreds, or thousands, of tons of sand, and as the Dervishes had laid waste the whole district, and killed the greater part of the population, no excavations on the site were possible. In 1916-19, thanks to the liberal equipment provided by Harvard-Boston Expedition, Dr. Reisner was able to attack the Pyramids of Nûri and with most

satisfactory results. The largest pyramid, about 165 feet square, stands on the eastern horn of the crescent, and there are several smaller pyramids about it; on the western horn are fourteen large pyramids and five small. Here the tomb of the Ethiopian king Aspelta had been found in 1916. In 1917, the excavation of the tomb of Tirhâkâh was accomplished, but with difficulty, on account of the cracked masonry, the heat of the chambers, and the water that covered the floors of them. Further excavations revealed the fact that Nûri was the great cemetery of the twenty kings of Ethiopia who reigned after Tanut-Åmen and thanks to the inscribed objects that have been found there, we now know their names, and probably the order of their succession, and are able to reconstruct the history of the later Ethiopian kingdom down to the first half of the third century, B.C.

The traveller now-a-days proceeds from Marawî to Abu Ḥamad by the Abu Ḥamad-Karêmah Railway. The line is laid on the flat desert behind the hills on the right or east bank of the Cataract. From Marawî it proceeds to Dakhfili, a large camping ground close to the river, opposite Shirri Island, about 70 miles from Marawî. This is the only place en route where the railway touches the river. Leaving Dakhfili we run direct to No. 10 Station on the Wadî Ḥalfah-Abu Hamad Railway, 18 miles from Abu Hamad. The line is about 138 miles long, and was built by Capt. E. C. Midwinter, R.E., Mr. C. G. Hodgson, Mr. G. B. Macpherson Grant, and Mr. H. V. Hawkins, and was opened on the 8th of March, 1906, by Sir Reginald Wingate, Governor-General of the Súdán. From Karêmah steamers run at regular intervals to and from Karmah, between June and March, and thus the produce of the Donkola Province can now be sent without difficulty to Atbarâ and the Red Sea and to Kharțûm.

The principal places in the Fourth Cataract may be thus enumerated:

Bělal, or Bellal, 7 miles from Marawî, at the foot of the Fourth Cataract, which extends to Abû Ḥamad, a distance of 140 miles. A few miles beyond Bělǎl, on the west bank, are the remains of a Coptic building, part monastery and part fortress, which contained a church, and opposite Hamdab Island, about six miles further on, are the ruins of a pyramid. The journey from Bělǎl to Abû Ḥamad is difficult, but the following places in the cataract will always possess interest for the British. Birti, 51 miles from Marawî, the headquarters

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of the River Column in the Nile Expedition of 1884; Kirbekan, 59 miles from Marawî, where the British defeated the Dervishes, February 10th, 1885, and General Earle was killed by a Dervish who " sniped" him from a hut; Salamat, 90 miles from Marawi, which was occupied by the British on February 17th; and Habbah, 101 miles from Marawî. On September 18th, 1884, the steamer Abbas," with Colonel Stewart on board, was run aground on the west side of the island of Habbah, and every one of the 44 men on board, except four, was treacherously murdered by the arrangement of Sulêman Wâd Kamr, the shêkh of the Munâşîr tribe. The British troops, on February 17th, 1885, destroyed the house and palm-trees and water-wheels of this shêkh, and three days later the property of Fakrî Wâd Atmân, in whose house at Habbah Colonel Stewart had been murdered, was also destroyed. The ill-fated steamer was seen tightly fixed on a rock about 200 yards from the river, with her bottom about 20 feet above low-water level; she was pitted with bullet marks and rent by fragments of shell.

Abû Ḥamad, 587 miles from Wâdî Ḥalfah by river and about 232 by rail, is near the head of the Fourth Cataract. On August 7th, 1897, the village was captured by General Sir A. Hunter, and about 1,200 men of the Dervish garrison there were slain; at this battle Major Sidney and Lieutenant FitzClarence were killed. Abû Ḥamad derives its name from a local shêkh who is buried here, and whose memory is greatly venerated in the neighbourhood, and it owes its importance entirely to the fact that the caravans which crossed the Nubian Desert started from it. It is said that any article left at the tomb of the shêkh by a traveller on his departure will be found there uninjured on his return! At Abû Hamad are excellent baths for ladies and gentlemen.

Abû Ḥamad to Khartûm by Railway.

On the railway between Abû Ḥamad and Kharţûm the traveller will pass the following stations:-Mashra adDakêsh (mile 248); Abû Dîs (mile 267); Sherêk (mile 291); Abû Salîm (mile 318); Al-'Abîdîyah (mile 343); and Berber (North) is reached at mile 361. For the first 70 miles the line runs close to the Nile; it then turns sharply into the desert, in which it runs for 20 miles, when it returns to

the Nile bank, along which it runs into Berber. Before Abû Ḥamad and Berber were connected by railway the journey was made partly by river and partly by land, the reason being that between Nadah, 68 miles from Abû Ḥamad, and Bashtanab the navigation was impeded for four miles by rocks, and by the Fifth Cataract, which extended from Umm Hashîyah to Ganênattah, a distance of about 14 miles. Nadah is at the foot of the Abu Sinûn Cataract, better known as the Al-Bakara Rapid; the Fifth Cataract is called Shallâl al-Ḥimâr, or the "Cataract of the Wild Ass[es]," and the end of it is about 88 miles from Abû Ḥamad.

Berber (latitude N. 18° 1', longitude E. 33° 59′), on the east bank of the river, marks the northern boundary of the country of the Barâbarâ, which extended as far south as Abyssinia, and included all the land on the east bank of the Nile between the Niles and the Red Sea. To this point on the Nile, from very ancient times, the products of the Sûdân, gum, ivory, ebony, gold, curious animals, slaves, etc., have been brought on their road to the coast of the Red Sea at Sawâkin, and it is probable that, for many reasons, the Sûdân boatmen were not in the habit of proceeding further north. The country round about Berber is rich, and was, and still is, with care, capable of producing large crops of grain of various kinds, which are sufficient for the needs of a city of considerable size; the city, however, owed its importance, not to the grain-producing qualities of the neighbourhood, but to its position on the great caravan routes to and from the Sûdân, and the facilities which it offered for traffic and barter. The distance from Berber to Sawâkin is about 245 miles. Two principal routes are laid down by the Intelligence Department of the Egyptian Army, but the ordinary caravan route is via Obak, 57 miles from Berber; Ariab, III miles from Berber; Kokreb, 145 miles from Berber ; Dissibil, 200 miles from Berber; and Tambuk, 219 miles from Berber. The old town of Berber is described as having been much like a town of Lower Egypt, with dusty, unpaved streets, and houses built of unbaked bricks, and having flat roofs; in the early years of the nineteenth century it possessed a few large mosques, and abundant palm and acacia trees. Under Turkish rule the town lost much of its prosperity, and the Dervishes ended what the Turkish officials began. The new town lies to the north of the old town, and contained many large, well-built houses, but most of them have been without tenants for years, and are now in ruins.

Old and New Berber straggle along the river bank for a distance of six miles. Berber fell into the hands of the Mahdî's forces on May 26th, 1884, but it was re-occupied by the Egyptian troops on September 6th, 1897, and a week later General Sir A. Hunter entered the town with his army. At mile 384 from Ḥalfah is Atbarâ Junction, whence travellers can proceed by rail to Sawâkin and Port Sûdân.

The Nile-Red Sea Railway. The history of Egypt and of the Egyptian Sûdân up to the period of the XXVIth dynasty shows that the greater part of the trading which was done between the two countries passed up and down the Nile and along the great desert routes in the Eastern and Western Deserts. There was no easy outlet for Sûdân trade on the west, and none worth mentioning on the east. There were,

no doubt, ports at the places now called Sawâkin and Maṣawa' in the earliest times, and we are justified in assuming that there was a certain amount of sea-borne trade carried on between the inhabitants of the mainland and those of the Peninsula of Arabia. During the rule of the Saïte kings many of the trade routes between Egypt and various parts of the Egyptian Sûdân were revived and developed, and under the Ptolemies the traffic on them became brisk. Still, so far as we know, no Ptolemy ever made any attempt to connect the Nile in the Northern Sûdân with the Red Sea by means of a desert route with wells at comparatively frequent intervals. Both Ptolemies and Romans followed the example of the earlier kings of Egypt, and forced all the trade of the Sûdân through Egypt. After the conquest of Egypt by the Arabs, A.D. 640, immigration of Arabs into the Sûdân took place on a fairly large scale, and the new-comers settled down on the Nile and in many a fertile spot in the Egyptian Sûdân. In process of time communication between the Nile and the Red Sea became frequent, and regular caravan routes were formed. The slave merchants, who were usually Arabs, exported by their means slaves from the country south of Khartûm, and imported stuffs, etc., which they bartered for slaves, gold, gum, etc. 1517 we find that Salîm, the Turkish conqueror of Egypt, sent an expedition into the Sûdân viâ Maṣawa', and we know that it invaded Ethiopia, and made its way westwards as far as Sennaar, where the Fûngs had established their capital. Further to the north there was a caravan route between Berber and Sawâkin, and as the distance between these places was not, comparatively, great, being only from 230 to 250

In