Crossword-Solution: GIRBA 5 letters, 1 clue 🏆 scrabble score: 8

Around this the skin is gathered to the size of a large handful, which, when the girba is full of water, is tied round with whip-cord.

They are then all besmeared on the outside with grease, as well to hinder the water from oozing through, as to prevent its being evaporated by the action of the sun upon the girba, which in fact happened to us twice, so as to put us in imminent danger of perishing with thirst.

But we had taken a girba of water with us, or rather, in case of accident, a little in each of the three girbas; and all being ready on the river-side, except the king's servant, we set out, and he overtook us in less than two hours afterwards, pretty well refreshed with the Shekh's bouza, and strongly prejudiced against us, as we had occasion to discover afterwards.

Each thorn is as sharp as a needle and about an inch long; indeed, the native women use them as a cobbler does his awl, and I have often seen a woman using the thorn to pierce a girba and shreds of the palm leaf to sew it up with.

Sixty kilometres lower down is the Khasm-el-Girba gauge, just upstream of Fasher and about 420 kilometres from the Nile.