The ANANDA, its harmonious Joy, into infinite tones of sentiment and passion, which produce the result of tragic history.

The infinite Here is rolled into space.

The eternal punctual Now, into successive time.

And the divine, eternal, and round life of True Being becomes evolved and extended, and rolled out, as it were, into successive history.

And that prismatic Maya itselfBut I fear, said the Rishi, seeing the bewildered faces of his audience-and feeling he was getting beyond their comprehension, I fear I begin to grow unintelligible."

Ravan said nothing. He was completely mystified; and was just then puzzling himself in the endeavour to solve in his own mind the problem, whether he had ten heads, or one, or any head at all, on his shoulders. he had shoulders.

if

"I should like to know," said the arch Gupta, in a low voice, as if speaking to herself, but quite loud enough to be overheard, as she intended, in the whole circle, "whether Madhavi Panza is a How or a WHAT."

"In truth, good Rishi," said the stout and simple Mandodari, with downright frankness, "I do not comprehend you. I cannot understand at

all what you mean by the True Being being rolled out into space and history. Am I not, for example, a true being? Now I cannot for the life of me conceive myself being rolled out into any sort of history, or into space or time either, without disappearing altogether under such a process."

"These matters, oh transcendent Ezamana!" said Sulochana reverentially, "are above the comprehension of us poor females; explain to us rather, great Rishi, the vision of Zingarel. As she is a woman, we may understand more of her than of such subtile matters as Time and Space.

"Oh! yes, dear Guru," said little Ghanta Patali, clapping her tiny hands with a look of delight, "tell us all about that poor, dear Zingarel, and the terrible aligator, and that darling little cow of the sea."

The Rishi was not sorry for this diversion. Perhaps he may have felt, if the truth could be seen, that he was getting out of his own depth, and becoming unintelligible even to himself. The ground of allegory, at all events, he thought, would be firmer and safer, than the transcendental metaphysics of the Vedanta philosophy. The moral, at least, would be clearer to the women; and he knew all their influence on history, even when refusing, like the good Mandodari, to be personally rolled out into it.

In this paper we propose bringing before our readers such additions to our knowledge on the subject of the Nile countries, as may be collected from the recent works of Mr. Mansfield Parkyns, and of the Prussian traveller, Dr. Lepsius. We lately noticed the three years' residence of the former of these gentlemen, in the Abyssinian kingdom of Tigre, which, until the appearance of his book, was undescribed, and intimated our intention of soon examining that more arduous, and, as we think, still more interesting journey

which he undertook on leaving that country, and which forms the subject of the concluding portion of his second volume. From Tigré Mr. Parkyns went westward, through deserts and untried countries, to Abou Kharraz, on the Blue Nile, a route which is altogether new, no European having been that way before him. Descending the Blue Nile from Abou Kharraz, we shall go on with Mr. Parkyns to Khartoum, the capital of Upper Nubia, where this river joins the White or true Nile. Then, parting from Mr.

1852.

Parkyns, we shall ascend the Nile with Dr. Lepsius, from Cairo back again to Khartoum, and there, making our adieus to the travellers twain, we may conclude by glancing with Mr. Cooley at Inner Africa, directing our attention more particularly to what has long been called the source-territory of the Nile. We hope thus to gather in our rapid route whatever there may be of prominent interest, whether personal, geographical, or antiquarian, in the several works before us.

Mr. Parkyns left Adoua, the capital of Tigré, in the last week of June, 1845. The rains were setting in, and the remittance which, after long delays, had reached him just before, was sorely infringed on, by his paying off the engagements he had been obliged to enter into during his long residence in Abyssinia. Heavy rains and a light purse were serious additions to the inevitable difficulties of his new undertaking, and to which, it must be remembered, that he was in no wise compelled. A few days, and a route with which he was well acquainted, would have taken him to Massawa on the Red Sea, and so to Cairo, or home, and for that he had ample funds. Difficulties, however, instead of deterring Mr. Parkyns, were rather attractive to him, and certainly no European was ever better trained to meet the obstacles which lay before him. We have already introduced him to our readers as one, who, during his four years' wanderings in tropical Africa, wore neither hat nor any other covering for his head; who, adopting the usages of the natives, was unconscious of a shirt, and never knew a shoe, although in the various countries through which we have followed him, there are no roads, and such tracts as exist, are usually covered with the long and strong thorns which grow on most of the trees, and are constantly making pincushions of the traveller's feet. Mr. Parkyns, too, had acquired the Abyssinian liking for raw flesh, could live on but little water, and was not particular as to its purity; he was also well accustomed to sleep in the open air. Without these habits, he never could have encountered the perils of the way, or endured its miseries.

As

it was, abstinence, an al fresco life, and possibly the enjoyment of his passion for adventure, brought him scathless through dangers which few would think it possible to face and live

through torrent rains which resembled a shower-bath, save that they lasted for hours, and which he had to meet as one would a shower-bath, taking off all his clothes to keep them dry; through mud, and marsh, and miasma; starving at times, and at times receiving wounds, which in England, and under the treatment of an experienced surgeon, would have kept him in his bed for weeks, but from which his Abyssinian training enabled him to recover almost at once, and perfectly.

The first incident of the journey was tragical, and occurred at the passage of the Taccazy, some fifty miles distant from Adoua, and the boundary of the kingdom of Tigré in that direction. The Taccazy, called also the Atbarah, is one of the great rivers of Abyssinia, and a principal tributary of the Nile, into which it flows 160 miles below Khartoum. It rises in the highlands of Lasta in Abyssinia, and takes its name "Taccazy," that is, "the terrible," from the impetuosity of its torrent. The Taccazy is the last of the affluents of the Nile; and from their junction down to the Mediterranean, a distance of 1,200 miles, the Nile does not receive a single brook. Mr. Parkyns describes the Taccazy as about as broad as the Thames at Greenwich, and as rapid and boisterous in its course as the Rhone when it leaves the lake of Geneva. Arrived at the ford where they were to cross, the guide directed them to halt while they made up their baggage into convenient parcels before entering the water, stowing the perishable articles in skins, and tying their clothes in bundles which they were to carry, each man his own, turban-like, on his head. While this was going on, an active and intelligent German, whom Mr. Parkyns had taken into his service at Adoua, but who is known to us only by his oriental name of Yakoub, entered the river:

"I was," says Mr. Parkyns, who may better tell the rest, "proceeding very leisurely in my preparations, finishing a pipe, and waiting to be summoned, when I heard one of the Abyssinians call out, 'Come back, come back!' A black who was with us answered him, 'Oh, never fear, he's a child of the sea!' I looked up, and saw Yakoub wading out in about two feet of water, and occasionally taking a duck under as if to cool himself. Aware that he was ignorant of the language, I called to him, telling him that he had better not go alone, but wait till some one, acquainted with the

peculiarities of the river, should guide him; he answered, laughing, that he was not going much farther, and that he could swim. I did not think there could be any danger if he remained where he was, the water not being more than a yard deep, and he had told me before that he was an extremely good swimmer; but the guides had cautioned me of the danger of the whirlpools, currents, and mud, which they said rendered it impossible for anything, even a fish, to live in some parts of the torrent; so when on looking up I saw him moving about, I again called to him, begging of him with much earnestness to return. He answered something that made me laugh, at the same time swinging his arms about like the sails of a windmill, so as to splash the water all round him. He might have been thirty yards from the shore, and a little lower down the stream than where I sat. Still talking with him, I looked at what I was doing for a single instant, and then, raising my eyes, saw him as if trying to swim on his back, and beating the water with his hands, but in a manner so different from his former playful splashing, that, without knowing why, I called to him to ask what was the matter. He made no answer, but seemed as if moving a little down the stream for a yard or two, and then quicker and quicker. I was up in an instant, and ran down shouting to the people to help him, though at the same time I thought that he was playing us a trick to frighten us. A thick mass of canes and bushes, under the shade of which most of the servants had been sitting, overhung the river for several yards' distance, just below where I was. Having to pass behind these, I lost sight of him, and before I reached the other end of them the horrible death-howl of the Abyssinians warned me that he had sunk to rise no more. We ran along the shore for some miles, in the melancholy hope that perhaps the torrent might cast his body on to some bank, or that he might be caught by a stump or bough, many of which stuck up in the water, but it was an almost hopeless chance. The swiftest horse could not have equalled the pace of that fierce stream, and probably the body had been carried several miles before we had got over one. At times our attention would be attracted for a moment by a clot of white foam left on the mud, but at length we retraced our steps, sad, fatigued, torn to pieces by the mimosa bushes through which we had forced our naked bodies, and having seen no signs of Yakoub since he sank. From the time I saw him, full of health and spirits, standing splashing the water in the bright sunshine, what a change had come over our whole party! Twenty seconds after, his death-wail was raised"One moment, and the gush went forth Of music-mingled laughter

The struggling splash and deathly shriek
Were there the instant after.'

And now that we were again on the spot,

as if to make everything more gloomy, the sun was set, and scarcely a sound was to be heard but the dull moaning of that fatal river."

They could never exactly determine how it was that this poor man perished, but the natives who saw him last, struggling where the water was deepest, and his head sinking gradually down, were all of opinion that a crocodile had taken him; and this too is the impression of Mr. Parkyns. Such fatalities are not unfrequent, and in our notice of the "Life in Abyssinia " we cited an account of the death of a French traveller, who, in crossing the river Mareb, was picked out by a crocodile as he was swimming between two blacks.

During the time thus occupied, the water had risen several inches, and was still rising; so, urged by their guide to lose no further time, they entered the river, two and two together, each pair connected by a couple of large poles laid across their shoulders, to which were tied portions of the baggage, and some heavy stones. last addition gave them weight to resist the stream. It took them a long time

The

to get over, and every one of them acknowledged to having been several times nearly carried off his legs. Mr. Parkyns mentions that the water reached his breast in the deepest part, and up to the chins of most of his people. "In the morning," he adds, 66 we had looked forward to the crossing with the greatest pleasure, the risk attending it only appearing as a little spice to make it all the more agreeable. When we first saw the water, it seemed all bright, from the sunshine and our own cheerfulness; when we crossed it, it was dark, chilly, and the grave of our comrade."

Having crossed the Taccazy, they were now out of Tigré and in Waldabba, the frontier province of Abyssinia in this direction, and next to the hostile territory of the Barea. The ferocity of their new neighbours was attested by the frequent occurrence of the bones of their victims; but as few travel in the rainy season, they had the greater hope of passing unmolested. After crossing a wild table- land, in some places covered with mimosa forest, they arrived, on the third day, at the Zarima. This river, they supposed, would have offered them no impediment; but on reaching it they found that it was a

deep rapid, with, in some places, nearly as much pretension to the title of cataract as the falls of the Nile in Upper Egypt. The guide, indeed, assured them that it would go down by morning, and probably be no more than ankle deep. Instead, however, of going down, it increased; and as they had not at all counted on this difficulty, and were unprovided with food, they were in a very serious predicament. All the industry of all the party could make out little more for food than a few dried vetches each, and they were as miserably off in other respects. The rains poured down upon them for three hours out of every four; while such fuel as they could procure was so saturated with wet, that they were scarcely ever able to get up a fire. Four days of a life like this reconciled them to the hazard of trying to cross the river as it was. This Mr. Parkyns, his guide, and some of the party did, with great difficulty, and aided by the frail contrivance of inflated goat-skins. The luggage porters and one or two of his people refused to cross, preferring to make their way up the stream until they reached some Waldabba village. Mr. Parkyns never heard of them afterwards; and as they were without provisions, and had to trust to fish or wild vegetables for subsistence, without, as we are told, much chance of obtaining either, their fate must be looked upon as doubtful.

This obstacle surmounted, our party reached a village, from which, after resting for a night, they continued their journey until they reached Cafta, a frontier town of this part of Abyssinia. Their route lay for some miles through a dense mimosa forest, and for the remainder of the way, across low plains, whose dark soil was moistened by the rains into mud, which, softening the skin of the feet of our shoeless travellers, rendered them more susceptible to the always-abounding thorns. Their couches in these morasses were not luxurious. Every night they collected pieces of wood, large stones, &c., building their beds of sufficient height to keep them above the mud; a tanned hide spread upon this, formed their sleeping-place, and when it came on to rain, their covering also. Sometimes they had green boughs to lie on; but it was rare to get them dry enough, and free from thorns.

Cafta is a market-town, much resorted to by Arabs from some of the Sennar

provinces. The goods for sale are principally country cotton stuffs, horses, and slaves. Here our author was taken for a Turkish spy, and arrested by the governor of the frontier; but luckily an Abyssinian came forward who stated that he knew him to be the friend of Prince Shétou, the Viceroy of Tigré's son; and he was thereupon not only liberated, but treated with marked consideration. Here, too, he made the acquaintance of a son of Nimr, a Nubian emir, which, as we shall see, proved of service to him.

After some days of refreshing rest at Cafta, our author again started for Soufi, on the Taccazy, where that river bends northwards in its course to the Nile. They passed through a wellwooded and picturesque district, which, however, they were told was haunted by a marauding and cruel tribe, but the worst enemy they met with was the rain. We have seen how they slept in the plains of mud by night; we shall now tell how, during the rains, they saved their clothes dry by day. Their method was, as Mr. Parkyns observes, at once simple and effective--"If halting," he says,

"we took off our clothes and sat upon them; if riding, they were placed under the leathern shabraque of the mule's saddle, or under any article of similar material, bag or bed, that lay on the camel's back. A good shower-bath did none of us any harm; and as soon as the rain was over, and the moisture on our skins had evaporated, we had our garments as dry, warm, and comfortable as if they had been before a fire." This arrangement was the more important, as each man's wardrobe consisted only of what he carried on his back.

Thus travelling they reached the retreat of the Nubian emir, or, as he is called, "Mek" Nimr. It is situated on the summit of a hill, the site being chosen partly from its being more healthful than the plain, partly from its being less open to a surprise by the Egyptians; or, as Mr. Parkyns, adopting the phrase of the country, always calls them the Turks. The name of Nimr is historical, as he took a memorable part in defence of his country when it was first invaded by Mohammed Ali. The word "Nimr" means "the leopard," a sobriquet which the chief has long accepted. The title "Mek" is a corruption of "Melek,” signifying king or prince. Before the Occupation of Nubia by the Turco

Egyptian forces, its various provinces were governed each by its own " mek,” or king, who was at times tributary to the king of Sennar, at others independent. Nimr was prince of the Jalyn, who occupied the country about Shendy and Matemma, or the Nile, S. E. of Dongola.

Nimr was the Abd-elKader of that district; and the cause of his having to fly and take refuge in this far-off desert, was his having put to death Ismael Pacha, the son of the Viceroy of Egypt, and the commander of his forces. The story is told by Mr. Parkyns; and that finest feature of the tragedy the devotion of Ismael's slaves may remind the reader of an older instance of Egyptian truth-the famed fidelity of the attendants of Cleopatra :

"Ismael Pacha, son of Mohammed Ali (the celebrated Viceroy of Egypt), had conquered all the Nubian provinces along the Nile. He came to Nimr's residence and began to bully him, as he had done all the other chiefs-among other things demanding immediate supplies of every kind of article he could think of, one thousand of each sort. Among these were a thousand camels. So Nimr prepared for their reception by collecting together a similar number of loads of millet-straw for provender, which were deposited in the yard and about the hut where the pacha lodged. Nimr, meanwhile, appeared unusually cheerful and polite to his guest, notwithstanding that he was threatened with the bastinado and other punishments if the supplies were not forthcoming in an impossibly short time. He promised to do his best, brought beer and food in profusion; and Ismael, having eaten as much as he could, and drunk more than was good for him, slept with that sort of heavy sleep usually attributed to owners of clean consciences. During the night the straw was piled round his hut and fired, the door being fastened outside to prevent his escape; and he was burnt to death with three white slaves who slept with him. It is said that his body was scarcely singed - for his slaves, when they saw the danger, had lain over him; and though they were reduced to cinders, he must have died of suffocation only. He had left his troops behind him; and the few personal attendants that accompanied him were surprised and killed by the Arabs as soon as their master's funeral pile was kindled. This is a rough sketch of the occurrence, which was the signal for the revolt of the whole of Nubia and Sennar. Mohammed Ali, immediately on hearing the news, despatched Mohammed Bey, the 'defterdar,' with an army to punish the rebels and take vengeance on the murderers of his son. The bey arrived at Shendy after a long and circuitous route, and after having most barbarously treated

the people of the country he passed through, but found that Nimr had taken himself off with many of his people to a safe place.

"The defterdar amused himself for a time by maiming some, killing others, and sending the best-looking of the young people off to Egypt for slaves. Among other atrocities he collected nearly the whole population of a village into a sort of penfold, and having packed them well with combustibles, burnt them alive. Nimr and his people fled first to Hallenga, then to the Hamran, thence to Soufy, afterwards to Gellabat, and at last settled down in their present situation."-p. 361-363.

On their arrival they were hospitably received by Immer, the Mek's eldest son, and shown to the guest's lodging attached to his dwelling. This was furnished with the simple comforts of an Arab's tent-rough stretchers, tanned hides, a large blazing fire in the centre, a heap of wood, and a jar of water; but cold, wet, weary, and halfstarved, as they were, we can well believe that they entered it, as Mr. Parkyns affirms they did, with more of satisfaction than ever a traveller in England experienced on approaching a first-rate hotel. Immer, to whom Mr. Parkyns brought a communication from his brother in Cafta, welcomed them with genuine kindness. Coffee was brought in, with a few cakes, and some grilled bones, which he tasted with them. This, however, was a form, and not the substantial meal, about which they were all at the moment somewhat solicitous. That followed, as the Prince retired, and was borne on the heads of three dark

slave girls. One of them carried a bowl of new milk, enough for ten persons. "She presented it to me," says Mr. Parkyns, with grateful recollection. "I tasted it; it was nectar, and she was Hebe! But no juice of the treacherous vine was ever half so sweet as that milk; and as for Hebe, I think she ought to consider herself highly flattered, that even for a moment I should have mistaken such a beauty for her." These slaves, we are told, are, like many girls of their country, models of form; but Mr. Parkyns, as he is compelled to own, cast his impassioned glance. not on these beauties, all faultless as they were but on the food they carried. One had a wooden bowl, containing a pile of "rahiff," or cakes of millet and wheat, but little thicker than paper. There was also "melah," the standing dish