358 FUTURE COMMUNICATION 



occur in Shoa. In Ankobar, during the severest 

 landslips, for they are nothing else, a loose stone 

 building thirty or forty feet high, and a still more 

 rickety arch built by Demetrius, although in 

 exposed situations, were not affected in the least. 



The tremour of the earth consequent upon 

 portions of its surface being detached, was only felt 

 upon the situation on which it occurred ; and were 

 it not for the heavy fall of rocks from the over- 

 hanging table-land, no evidences of a violent 

 convulsion could be ever observed ; so that I am 

 justified, in attributing to external influences, 

 rather than to internal operations, the occasional 

 agitations of the earth which are experienced in 

 Abyssinia during the wet season. 



The combined effects, however, of all these disinte- 

 grating agents of the table land of Abyssinia, is to 

 increase farther westward the course of the Hawash, 

 and we find that in the situation most favourable 

 for the operation of denudation there is contained, 

 its most distant sources. Already, by the testi- 

 mony of M. Rochet d'Hericourt and Dr. Krapf, 

 the head of the Hawash reaches within thirty 

 miles of the Abi, the Nile of Bruce, and that in that 

 direction it will still progress, may be safely assumed, 

 whilst the present order of things established by 

 nature is continued ; and in the course of time a 

 communication will most certainly be opened 

 between this river and that of Northern Abyssinia, 

 when probably, by this addition to its volume 



