About the hour of noon, the outscouts announced to the Pasha that the Sultan of Sennaar himself was approaching to salute his Excellence.  On his approach, the army received him with the honors due to his rank.  He was conducted to the tent of the Pasha, by the ambassadors he had sent, where he remained in audience with his Excellence a long time.  When the audience was finished, he and the personages he had before sent to the Pasha were splendidly habited in the Turkish fashion, and presented with horses, furnished with saddles and bridles embroidered with gold.[52]

It was on the morning following that the army reached the capital.  We marched in order of battle.  The Pasha, accompanied by the Sultan of Sennaar and his chief servants, in front.  On approaching the city, the army saluted this long wished for town, where they imagined that their toils and privations would cease, at least for a time, with repeated and continued volleys of cannon and musquetry, accompanied with shouts of exultation.  But these shouts subsided on a nearer approach, on finding this once powerful city of Sennaar to be almost nothing but heaps of ruins, containing in some of its quarters some few hundreds of habitable but almost deserted houses.  After the camp was pitched, and I had refreshed myself with a little food, I took a walk about the town.  At almost every step I trod upon fragments of burnt bricks, among which are frequently to be found fragments of porcelain, and sometimes marble.  The most conspicuous buildings in Sennaar are a mosque, and a large brick palace adjoining it.  The mosque, which is of brick, is in good preservation; its windows are covered with well wrought bronze gratings, and the doors are handsomely and curiously carved.  The interior was desecrated by uncouth figures of animals, portrayed upon the walls with charcoal.  This profanation had been perpetrated by the Pagan mountaineers who inhabit the mountains thirteen days march south of Sennaar, and who, at some period, not very long past, had taken the town, and had left upon the walls of the mosque these tokens of possession.

The palace is large, but in ruins, except the centre building, which is six stories high, having five rows of windows.[53] By mounting upon its roof you have the best possible view of the city, the river, and the environs, that the place can afford.  I judged that Sennaar was about three miles in circumference.  The greater part of this space is now covered with the ruins of houses, built of bricks either burnt or dried in the sun.  I do not believe that there are more than four hundred houses standing in Sennaar and of these one-third or more are round cottages, like those of the villages.  Of those built of bricks, the largest is the house of the Sultan.  It is a large enclosure, containing ranges of low but well built habitations of sun-dried bricks, with terraced roofs, and the interior stuccoed with fine clay.  What struck me the most, was the workmanship of the doors of the old houses of Sennaar, which are composed of planed and jointed planks, adorned frequently with carved work, and strengthened and studded with very broad headed nails; the whole inimitable by the present population of Sennaar.  These houses are very rarely of more than one story in height, the roofs terraced with fine and well beaten clay spread over mats laid upon rafters, which form the roof.