THE SOURCE OF THE NILE. 2& 7 



with equal reafon, he might have called every mile Saiel^ 

 from the Gulf of Suez to the line. 



We fee this abufe in the old Itineraries, efpecially in the 

 *Antonine, from fuch a town to fuch a town, fo many miles ; 

 and what is the next Itation ? (el feggera) ten miles. This 

 el feggera f, the Latin readers take to be the name of a 

 town, as Harduin, and all commentators on the claflics, have 

 done. But fo far from Seggera fignifying a town, it imports 

 juft the contrary, that there is no town there, but the travel- 

 ler muft be obliged to take up his quarters under a tree that 

 night, for fuch is the meaning of Seggera as a llation, and 

 fo likewife of SaieL 



At the foot of the mountain, or about feven yards up 

 from the bafe of it, are five pits or fliafts, none of them 

 four feet in diameter, called the Zumrud Wells, from which 

 the ancients are faid to have drawn the emeralds. We were 

 not provided with materials, and little endowed with incli- 

 nation, to defcend into any one of them, where the air was 

 probably bad. I picked up the nozzels, and fome frag- 

 ments of lamps, like thofe of which we find millions in 

 Italy : and fome worn fragments, but very fmall ones, of 

 that brittle green chryftal, which is the fibergct and bilur 

 of Ethiopia, perhaps the zumrud, the fmaragdus defcribed 

 by Pliny, but by no means the emerald, known fince the 

 difcovery of the new world, whofe firft character abfolute- 



If 



*Itin. Anton, a^avth. p. 4. 

 •;- So the next ftage from Syene is called Hiera Sycamines, a fy camore-tree, Ptol. lib. 4. p. 108- 



