THE NILE CATARACTS. 
521 
as filled with enormous rocks, as the shores and islands are themselves 
encumbered with the same granite masses. No wilder scene can be 
imagined than this waste called Dar Monassir. For miles together 
there is no vestige of vegitation : silence is broken only by the noise 
of the foaming waters; the rocks left bare by the subsiding current, 
and black and polished by sand and sun; wherever it is possible to 
climb the rugged hills on either shore, the eye ranges only over a 
wilder area of desolation, burnt and cindery rocks rise up in every 
direction from amid wastes of sand. At times the channels of the 
river are so sunken beneath the level of the granite wilderness around 
that they are perfectly hidden from sight at only a short distance from 
the shore. At intervals the islands disappear, the river flows gently 
in a single stream between, shores of black granite, as though its 
waters were resting between the cataract at Owli to the island of 
Sherri, a distance of about sixty miles, there cannot be less than 
twenty-five cataracts. Up to a recent period, in fact up to the boat 
expedition of 1884, little or nothing was known about these cataracts 
of Monassir. This was owing to the fact that they had always been 
avoided by travellers passing between Egypt and the Soudan; the 
caravans invariably quitting the Nile at Korti, and striking it again 
across the Bayouda at Metemmeh or Berber. 
But that they were passable at the height of inundation was proved 
by the fact that in the late sixties, or early seventies, two steamers had 
been taken up at high Nile from Dongola to Khartoum. It was this 
fact which was doubtless in Gordons mind when, in his journal at 
Khartoum, he wrote :—“ That there was only one small cataract to 
pass between Abu Hamed and Merowe, which is by all accounts an 
easy one.” 
As a matter of fact that very portion of the river is the most 
obstructed by cataracts of any in its entire length ; but perhaps mis¬ 
conceptions regarding its true nature are the most conclusive proof 
that it was an unknown region. In looking for, or thinking of, the 
source, of the great river, the explorer and the map-maker had alike 
forgotten the central portion of the stream where it pours its spent 
waters down the winding stairways of Dan Monassir. 
Passing the cataracts of Owli, Kab el Abd, Umahboa, Bahami, 
Uss, Shoar, and Sharrari, we emerge at last into quieter water, where 
the Nile, once more held in a single channel, and having sand instead 
of granite rock on its shores, flows past a small group of palms, and 
half-a-dozen mud huts called Hebeh. There is a small island, El Kun, 
opposite the group of huts, divided from the right bank of the river by 
a channel which is dry at low Nile. All around spreads a desert of 
yellow sand and gray rock, through which conical hills, whiter than the 
prevailing colour of the plains, abruptly show themselves. 
It was between the little island of El Kun and the right bank of 
the river that the steamer “ Abbas,” sent by General Gordon in 
September, 1884, with such precious freight of man and manuscript, 
was wrecked; and it was in the wretched group of mud huts on the 
shore that Colonel Stewart, the French and English Consuls, and their 
