in the Mountains of the Moon. 241 



Nevertheless, there is one of the head streams of the great 

 " River of Habesh," which, even if it should not eventually 

 prove to be the true upper course of that river, possesses, at 

 all events, peculiar claims to represent the head of Ptolemy's 

 second arm of the Nile. 1 allude to a river with whose ex- 

 istence I was made acquainted by the intelligentMohammedan 

 Abessinian, 'Omar ibn Nedjat, who furnished me, when in 

 Godjam, with much valuable information. 'Omar stated that 

 the Godjeb and Gibbe, after uniting in the country of the 

 Dokos with another river from Shoa,* the name of which 

 river he did not know, go round westwards and northwards, 

 to join the Bahr el Abyad ;t and in the map which I drew 

 under his dictation, and of which a fac-simile is given in the 

 seventeenth volume of the Journal of the Royal Geographical 

 Society, a large river is so laid down. In my Essay on the 

 Nile and its Tributaries, I identified this river from Shoa 

 with one which had previously been mentioned by M. Le- 

 febvre, under the name of " Gibbe," in the south of Shoa •,% 

 and I likewise considered it to be the same as either the Bo- 

 rara or the Walga, two rivers described, though not very dis- 

 tinctly, by M. d'Abbadie, as joining the Godjeb from about 

 the same direction. § But my impression now is, that another 

 river, which is laid down by the latter traveller in his two 

 sketch maps recently published in the Athenceum,\ has a 

 greater claim to be regarded as the stream mentioned by my 

 informant, 'Omar. On the occasion of his first journey to Kaffa, 

 M. d'Abbadie named this i-iver the Wosho, and described 

 its source^ as being " in Wolamo, at the water-parting be- 

 tween the basin of the White River and that of Lake Ab- 

 bale ;'' but in his maps in the Athenwum, above referred to, it 

 is now called the IFebi. 



From these few vague notices, it would be presumptuou.s 



* Instead of Skoa, Omar made use of the nauie of Ifat. This is the most 

 easterly province of Shoa, and is principally inhabited by Mohammedans, who 

 are in the practice of giving its name to the entire kingdom. 



t Journ. Roy. Oeoyr. Hoc, vol. xiii., p. 267 ; vol. xvii., p. 54. 



X Bulletin, 2d. Ser., vol. xiii., p. 373 ; vol. xiv., p. 129. 



§ NoHv. Ann. des Voy., 1845, vol. ii., p. 114. 



II No. 1042; pp. 1077, 1080. ^ Nouv. Ann. det Vuij., 1845, vol. ii., p. 114. 



