/69S 
mr browne's journey 
would enable him to obtain with the peculiar man- 
ners of the interior Africans, and the suspicions of 
the natives would be removed by his favourable re- 
ception in one of the interior kingdoms. He be- 
lieved that it would be equally easy to penetrate 
into Abyssinia by Kordofan, or to traverse Afri- 
ca from east to west, by a route which would af- 
ford an opportunity of determining various geogra- 
phical positions, and of observing numerous import- 
ant facts, both in manners and in commerce. He 
was informed that the inhabitants of Darfur ex- 
tended their seleteas, or armed expeditions for 
procuring slaves, above forty journeys to the south, 
along the banks of the Bahr-el-Abiad, which he 
conceived to be the true Nile unexplored by Euro- 
peans, and therefore believed, that, by accompany- 
ing one of these expeditions, he should not only 
accomplish this discovery, but traverse at least five 
degrees of unknown country. With these views, 
having provided himself at Assiut with five camels, 
at the price of L. 13 each, he joined the Soudan 
caravan, and departed from the vicinity of Assiut, 
on the 28th of May 1793. They journeyed over 
a sterile mountainous track, and, on the 31st, ar- 
rived at Gebel Ramlie, a rugged mountain of tufa, 
where, by a steep descent, they entered the desert. 
From the rock they beheld before them a valley of 
unbounded extent, covered with rocks and sand, 
diversified with scattered date trees, and stunted 
