Two of my servants have just returned from the Shilluks. I remarked yesterday and to-day that when the women belonging to the villages lying not far from the shore, and close to one another, came to water the herds, with their well made and nearly round pitchers on their heads, the men accompanied them, spear in hand, in consequence of the wicked enemy being in the vicinity. The women did not wear cotton stuff round their hips, but front and back aprons; and some had a third, a leathern one, without hair, thrown over the shoulders, or on the back. Man appropriates to himself the cotton stuff, when luxury goes so far, which is, however, very rare; yet he must be a chief of a village or a Sheikh, to be able to wear it, as is the case with the tribes up the river. My men were not able to purchase a spear or a shield from them. One of the Shilluks, who spoke Arabic well, declared that they wanted the spears themselves, and never sold them to Turks; that they were obliged to protect the cattle by weapons, and that by means of these beasts they purchased their corn, which does not grow in their country (perhaps in this year owing to the inundation), from which circumstance they were obliged to eat locusts (geràt). My men were sent away after this short conversation, during which they were courteously invited to sit down, as I saw at the distance. We proceed an hour before sun-rise from our place, but can only make a short course, in consequence of the wind being contrary, and soon halt again at the shore of the Shilluks; to-morrow we ought to be near Mount Defafaùngh. Thermometer sun-rise, 18°; noon to three o’clock, 30° to 31°; sunset, 29°.
6th April.—Still a contrary wind; the direction N.E., with easterly deviations. We saw a scanty forest on the right, but not any habitation,—mostly alluvial soil, which previously stood under water, even between the trees. When we set foot on such a ground as this, we cannot imagine from whence the reeds, partly burnt away, have sprung. The straw in wads covers the ground here and there, and solitary reed-stalks, the leaves of which seem blasted by the sun and wind; yet there are still tracts with reeds on wet soil: also some groups of reed or long straw huts, like beehives, stand on the left shore. In the afternoon we observe several birds, and the longing after meat drives the vessels of our General and Admiral to the right shore, where copsewood and isolated trees display themselves. Some of our party went off to shoot guinea fowls.
7th April.—Set off at an early hour, with a contrary, though not a strong, north-east wind, and continued in a north-easterly direction till some hours after sunrise. I hear the joyful cry of “Baghàras!” and perceive immediately from the window a dozen of these mounted herdsmen, who spring forward to the margin of the shore on the left side of the river, greet, and make signs to us. To see horses for the first time after several months gave me a delightful sensation.
It is, perhaps, certain, that cultivation has not ascended the river from hence, for otherwise the useful horse and the camel, which subsequently became indigenous on the Nile, would not have been forgotten, being two of the most necessary animals on earth. Flags and streamers, with the insignia of the Prophet, were hoisted to welcome the bold horsemen as Mahommedan brothers, and to soften their hearts. Then begins a barter for butter, milk, and sheep, but these Anti-Christs are hard to deal with, for they make us pay dearly for everything; yet they also take glass beads as well as gold. It is delightful to view these well-known heads, with their hair twisted back in a tuft. The men in blue shirts carry three or four lances, holding the longer and stronger one in their hand. The pretty girls wear a ferda round their hips, and the swelling bosom is uncovered. A ring decorates their nostrils, as in other regions, but, on the other hand, they wear long hair, falling in tresses on their shoulders—an ornament which we have never beheld in the upper countries. These horsemen, employed as an avant garde against the Shilluks, whom they do not fear in the least, are, according to Mariàn, a bold stem of the Baghàras from Kordofal (the last syllable fluctuates between fal and fan) who call themselves Abanies. Their Sheikh, who is said to be known to me, is called “Wood el Mamùd.” I cannot, however, recall his name to my recollection, although he has been with us in Khartùm.
The first island-park appeared this morning on the left, its convolvuli in full verdant splendour, and considerably elevated above the water; another one followed, but the variegated flowers were absent, and the lower part of the foliage of the hanging creepers was dry, having been covered longer by the water.
We halted at the left shore to wait for the oxen and sheep which the Baghàras had promised to bring, but these brothers in Mohammed, were too well acquainted with our Abu Daoud, Suliman Kashef, who would have dispensed with any payment, and therefore they did not shew themselves. “Naas batalin” (bad people) they were called,—and we navigate in the afternoon further to N.E., and wind to E., where the isolated Mountain Defafaùngh, hanging over the river, sets me on tenterhooks of expectation. Here I shall see pyramids and enormous walls, for the whole rock is said to be formed of burnt bricks (Top achmer). This might have been, therefore, the halting point for the archæology of the Ethiopian world. I must set out on my travels early in the morning and sketch the outlines of its ruins, even if I catch a fever that may continue several days.
8th April.—I was on my feet before daybreak, and woke, as usual, my men from their heavy sleep; I drank a strengthening draught of yemen, and set off with Thibaut, Sabatier, and three servants, one of whom carried a goat’s skin, containing water, to the mysterious mountain which, as the final end of Egyptian or Ethiopian civilization, the first or last power of human art, may afford so much éclaircissement to science. Cheerful and brisk—for the sun had not yet risen—I walked with the ostrich and crane, as I called Thibaut and Sabatier, on account of their quick strides, through the Ambak wood, and the long grass of the Savannah-prairie, which was partly burning under our feet. But soon the depressed land of an old river, with standing water therein, lay between us and the foot of Mount Defafaùngh. We perceived by some trees here, on a level with the shore of the Nile, that the water had risen four feet high—what a lake, then!—and, therefore, the Ambak was lying dry, and its root bent and feeble. Arnaud was advancing far behind us, with the military escort given to us for our protection, which we thought we could do without. When we saw armed natives at a little distance from where we stood, my two Frenchmen made a show of courage, but seemed to me to hide their fear under the cloak of joking. It would have been disgraceful to stop and wait for Arnaud, and so one after the other rode upon the shoulders of our strongest servants, to whom a comrade gave his hand, so that he might not stick in the clay soil and morass, and we crossed in this manner a narrow gohr, leaving the little lake and the standing pools at our left.
On we went through the dried low ground until we arrived, after walking a mile or so, at the foot of the mountain where the ground is again elevated, and contains some trees (also dome-palms). I let the others ascend as if they were running for a wager, and looked right and left for antiquities, picking up stones with which the steep path I had struck into was bestudded, whilst the long grass and low bushes, but still more the projecting rocks, made the ascent difficult and laborious. Some ledges of rocks encircle the gable-end like a crown; no human being could have chiselled here, nor has nature so disposed them in her natural course; I knew the cause from what I had already seen, and from the specimen I had put into my fowling-bag; I was standing upon volcanic ground, and therefore I might expect to see a crater on the top. Reddish ashes and pieces of lava of similar colour filled the space between the rocks, the porosity of which, as well as the particles of shining black little stones, similar to coals and porphyry, convinced me that they have also undergone a powerful volcanic fire, which has dried up all the pores; or the entire mountain might have risen from a subterraneous forge, and poured over itself a thick coating of lava like liquor from a foaming goblet.
If we go upon the supposition, that it is an independent volcano, and not merely an elevated volcanic mass, we may easily recognize in the top an extinct crater, levelled by the fallen walls of rock, such as we see even now on the eastern side, by lava and volcanic mud, wherein ants at present wallow, and by the crumbling fragments of projecting rocks. The summit of this burnt-out volcano forms an oval terrace from N.W. to S.E.; the north-eastern part, however, is shelving, but the reservoir of lava could not be transplanted here, for some of the breaks of the mountain in that part, are precipitously disrupt, and there are no signs of a lava stream below. The porous rocks on the summit, exhibit a kind of decay, entirely earthy and friable, so that we might believe that they were once covered with boiling mud. The curved rocks, jutting out to the south, are smooth, considerably lower than our summit, and separated from it by a horizontal rocky wall, cleft here and there, which surrounds the crater at the top, and is not higher on the side we are than five to ten feet. The flat part of the upper ring falls away slightly to the west, and no lava stream was to be seen here. If the great lake so often spoken of by me existed at one time, its waters never perhaps dashed over the summit of this Stromboli, which is about four hundred feet high, much as it might increase by the opened sluices of the high land, and thus be in a condition to reach the volcanic mountain itself. An immeasurable circular plain lay now at our feet, in which the Nile extended from W. to N.; at its side, turned towards us, were several standing mountain streams, which join the Nile again at the rainy season, and testify to the changeableness of the course of the river, whose waters formed at one time a large lake at the foot of this mountain, and still do so at high water. No city, therefore, could have stood here, and still less on the little summit of the mountain, where also not a single fragment speaks in favour of the previous existence of Tokuls, although the mountain would have afforded the most splendid building materials to a nation, that had even only attained a moderate degree of cultivation. I knew already that we should find no ruins here, for the so-called ruins were said to consist of top, or bricks; and the fragments of stone have a great similarity to bricks, but only at the first superficial glance. The Turks, however, had taken these stones for bricks, and their fiery imagination pictured immediately pyramids, fortresses, and tombs; which assumption appeared more credible to me, because by embracing it and believing in such an existence, I hoped to be able to trace out, whether the cultivation of the Ethiopians travelled up or down the river. After a few glances, however, at the upper valley of the White Nile, I was soon persuaded, that Defafaùngh only remained as a ne plus ultra, an ever-interesting boundary-mark of the cultivated western Ethiopia.
The prospect from the top presented to us some Dinka villages towards S., and a distant chain of mountains to S.E., and another to E. These seem also to lie isolated in the immeasurable plain, from the waters of which they might have stood forth, at one time, like islands. We saw the dung of hyænas and antelopes; and thousands of guinea-fowls enticed us to descend by a steep path on the south-eastern side, where the earlier volcanic phenomena were seen. I scrambled down, whilst the others were shooting, whom my huntsmen had followed by spontaneous impulse; twice I aimed and fired, but my gun flashed in the pan, and I had no more caps. I was therefore obliged to let the birds, driven up from below by Suliman Kashef’s Turks, fly round my head, or rise under my feet to the number of fifty to one hundred head, without even being able to kill them by throwing stones, or treading them to death. I thought habeat sibi, and wandered over the numberless wild paths, intersecting one another, between thorns and long straw, to the nearest reach of the mountain, which is only slightly elevated towards it in N.E., but of equal height to its base. Up rose a flock of guinea-fowls here, another covey alighted there; they jumped up and run on all sides to hide themselves, or flew to the slopes of the mountain, where they were received by the soldiers standing above, with a discharge from their terrible weapons, which perhaps they had never heard before. Some of the birds smelling powder, who were in the neighbouring copsewood, called the others in vain to leave the circuit of their hitherto Zion.