382 TRAVELS TO DISCOVER
Gondar, by a number of obfervations of the fun and {tars made by day and night, in the courfe of three years, with an agronomical quadrant of three feet radius, and two excellent telefcopes, and by a mean of all their fmall differ- ences, is in lat. 1 2 34' 30" ; and by many obfervations of the fatellites of Jupiter, efpecially the firft, both in their im- merfions and emerfions during that period, I concluded its longitude to be 37 ^^' o' call from the meridian of Greenwich.
It was the 4th of April 1770, at eight o'clock in the morning, when I fet out from Gondar. V/e palled the Kah- ha, and the Mahometan town, and, about ten in the morn- ing, we came to a confiderable river called the Mogetch, which runs in a deep, rugged bed of flakey blue Hones. We croiled it upon a very iblid, good bridge of four arches, a convenience feldom to be met with in palling Abyffinian ri- vers, but very neceflary on this, as, contrary to moll of their flreams, which become dry, or Hand in pools, on the ap- proach of the fun, the Mogetch runs conftantly, by rca- fon that its fources are in the higheft hills of Wogg^ra, where clouds break plentifully at all feafons of the year. In the rainy months it rolls a prodigious quantity of water into the lake Tzana, "and would be abfolutcly unpayable to people bringing provifion to the market, were it not for this bridge built by Eacilidas ; yet it is not judicioufly pla- ed, being clofc to the mountain's foot, in the face of a tor- rent, where it runs ilrongeil, and carries along with it Hones of a prodigious lize, which luckily, as yet, have injured no part of the bridge. The water of the river Mogeticn is not wholefomc, probably from the minerals, or flony particles at carries along with it, and the flatey ftrata over which it
1 runs.
