TRANSACTIONS OF THE SECTIONS. 7h 
course on the level of the plateau, fall abruptly into deep-cut valleys, in which they 
soon reach a depression of from 3000 to 4000 feet below the general level of the table- 
land, The valleys of the larger streams are of considerable width—that of the 
Abai to the south of the peninsula of Gédjam, is at least twenty-five miles from the 
extreme points where it breaks from the table-land on either side. As the country 
within the valleys is exceedingly wild and irregular, with all the characters of a 
mountainous one, nothing is easier for a traveller, who has not first taken a com- 
prehensive view of the entire region, and who, on crossing a river, finds himself 
‘shut up within a mass of broken country rising around him on all sides to a relative 
elevation of 3000 or 4000 feet or even more, than to suppose that, in ascending this 
broken country on either side, he is crossing a mountain chain; whereas, on reach- 
ing the summit, he has merely arrived upon the table-land. It is important to bear 
this in mind in the perusal of the works of travellers in Abessinia, many of whom, 
under the impression thus alluded to, place mountains, where mountains, in the ordi- 
nary accéptation of the term, do not exist. 
Where the rivers begin to break from the table-land, which they do by fissures 
in the rocky surface, at first only a few yards in breadth, but gradually opening to 
the extent of several miles, they at once form cataracts of 80 or 100 feet, or even 
more, in height, and then continue down a succession of falls and rapids, so as to 
descend several thousand feet in a course of a few miles. For example, the Abai, 
in a distance of only twenty-five miles between the two bridges over it, in the north- 
east of Gédjam, falls upwards of 2000 feet, or 80 feet per mile ; and in the next eighty 
miles of its course it falls nearly 1000 feet more. So too, in a distance of 100 miles 
between Angolalla, the Galla capital of Shoa, and the ford of the Dérra Gallas, 
on the way to Gédjam, the difference of elevation between the head-streams of the 
Djémma, a principal tributary of the Abdi, and the Abii itself is nearly 5600 feet ; 
which gives a fall of 56 feet per mile. 
~The uniformity of the surface of the table-land is further broken by higher 
mountain masses, which, in some parts, as in Sdmien, Angot, Gddjam, Miécha, 
Kaffa, &c., attain an absolute elevation of from 11,000 to 15,000 feet. These 
greater elevations do not however appear to form parts of any regular system, but 
to be distinct, isolated masses, unconnected either with each other or with the 
general bearing of the entire plateau. 
- A remarkable peculiarity of this table-land is, that many of its principal rivers 
have a spiral course, so that after having formed a curve of greater or less extent— 
mostly, as would appear, round these higher mountain masses,—they return upon 
themselves at a comparatively short distance from their sources. As instances are 
mentioned the Méreb, the Béllegas, the Abdi, the Gibbe, and the Gddjeb. This 
latter river, of which the first accounts were given by Dr. Beke, is not the head of 
the Jubb or Gowin, as has been imagined, but one of the principal arms of the Bahr- 
el-Abyad or true Nile. : 
All the streams of the western counter-slope of the Abessinian chain are affluents 
of the Nile, and their easternmost branches take their rise at the extreme eastern 
edge of the table-land, which is thus the limit of the basin of the Nile, and the 
watershed between its affluents and those of the rivers flowing eastward and south- 
ward towards the Indian Ocean, On the seaward side of this watershed, the de- 
clivity being much more abrupt and its extent much more limited, the rivers must 
necessarily be of secondary importance. Of these, the Hawash, the Haines’s River, 
and the Jubb or Gowin (which latter river is apparently the lower course of the 
Wabbi—the Oby of de Barros*), are mentioned as instances ; and the author infers 
that to the south of the equator the watershed continues along southwards at a 
comparatively short distance from the eastern coast, so that when once the south- 
ern limits of the basin of the Nile are passed, the far greater mass of the immense 
tropical rains find their way to the ocean by the rivers discharging themselves into 
it on the western coast. , 
* Addition by the Author.—The Gowin or Jubb,—the pseudo-Gédjeb (Gochob) of Sir Wil- 
liam C. Harris,—which river enters the sea at Juba near the equator, and which was ascended 
by Mr. Arc Angelo in February 1844, is manifestly the ‘‘ Wébigi-weyna” of M. Antoine d’Ab- 
_badie. As Wabbi (Wébi) is an appellative signifying “river,” this name should be read 
“Wabbi-Giwéyna,” that is to say, the river Gowin. M. Rochet d’Hericourt places the source 
of this river in the country of Korchassi, to the south of lake Zuwai.—12th March, 1847. 
