800 JOURNEY TO CENTRAL AFRICA.

and degraded than the Fellahs of Egypt, bat that they are capable of great improvement is shown by the snccess attending the efforts of the Catholic priests in Khartoum, in educating children. The terrible climate of Soudan will always be a drawback to its physical prosperity, yet even this would be mitigated, in some measure, were the soil under cultivation.

As I followed the course of the Nile, from the northern limit of the tropical rains to Khartoum, my narrative will have given some idea of the country along his banks. The territory to the east, towards and beyond the Atbara, is still in a great measure unexplored. Burckhardt was the first European who visited it, but his route lay among the mountainranges near and parallel to the coast of the Red Sea. The long chain of Djebel Langay, which he crossed, is three to five thousand feet in height, and, like the mountain-spine of the island of Ceylon, never has the same season on both sides at once. When it rains on the eastern slopes, the western are dry, and the contrary. There is another and still higher chain near the coast, but the greater part of this region consists of vast plains, tenanted by the Arab herdsmen, and rising gradually towards the south into the first terraces of the table-land of Abyssinia. The land of the Shukorees and the Hallengas, lying on both sides of the Atbara, is called Belacl el Tallica.

Dr. Reitz visited it during the summer of 1851, in company with the military expedition under Moussa Bey, and travelled for three or four weeks through regions where no European had been before him.

Leaving the town of Shendy, he travelled eastward foi nine days over unbroken plains of grass, abounding with gazelles and hyenas, to a village called Groz Radjeb, on the At-