THE JUNCTION OF THE TWO NILES. 313 sheesh, which she took as if it had been her right. After invoking the name of Allah many times, she went to the grave and brought each of us a handful of dirt, which we carefully put into our pockets, but as carefully emptied out again after we had reached home.

The next morning I rode with the Consul to the junction of the two Niles, about a mile and a half to the west of Khartoum. The land all around is low, and the two rivers meet at right angles, but do not mingle their waters till they have rolled eight or ten miles in their common bed. The White Nile is a light-brown, muddy color, the Blue Nile a dark bluishgreen. Both rivers are nearly of equal breadth at the point of confluence, but the current of the latter is much the stronger.

There is a low green island, called Omdurman, in the White Nile, at its junction. The ferry-boat had just brought over a party of merchants from Kordofan, with their packages of gum A number of large vessels, belonging to the government, were hauled up on the bank, and several Arabs, under the direction of a Turkish ship-builder, were making repairs. We rode a short distance up the White Nile, over a beach which was deeply printed with the enormous foot-prints of a whole herd of hippopotami, and then home through the fields of blossoming beans. The Nile was to me a source of greater interest than all the negro kingdoms between Khartoum and Timbuctoo.

There, two thousand miles from his mouth, I found his current as broad, as strong, and as deep as at Cairo, and was no nearer the mystery of his origin. If I should ascend the western of his two branches, I might follow his windings twelve hundred miles further and still find a broad and powerful stream, af 14