38 BELGIAN TRAVELLERS.

The last occupants had left behind them cooking-pots, very neatly made mats, and chairs. These chairs were exactly like many of those made by the ancient Egyptians, to be seen in the Boulac Museum in Cairo, and which I have already mentioned. Some of the huts had holes in the ground, where the women burn perfumes, over which they crouch in order to scent their bodies.

We soon came to ;3?/-bushes, for the first time in any number ; and also came across the aloe, besides passing several khors bordered with dhotun-'2\m's>. There were scarcely any birds : doves, which usually abound everywhere, were conspicuous only by their absence.

We made a march of nine and a half hours, and pitched our tents in a kJior called Omri. There was a considerable difference in the temperature of the nights about this time : instead of the mercury falling no farther than 68° to 70°, it varied from 50° to 55°, which was far from disagreeable after the hot days. On Jan. 2, while on the march, we met a Belgian doctor, returning to the coast. He had been shooting with a gentleman whom he had left in the neighbourhood of Cassala, and had under his care a professional cJiasscnr who was suffering from sunstroke, and was very anxious to return to his native " happy hunting-grounds " in Belgium. He gave us a dreadful account of the heat and mosquitoes at Cassala, and the unhealthiness of the place ; but, as I had once spent a fortnight there, I was not alarmed by his report.

Khors increased daily in number. We crossed one very wide one called Aredey : it must have been fully two hundred yards in breadth, with a thick belt of dhoiims on either bank. As there was water a little distance from where we passed over, a camel was left behind to bring some on. We encountered a jackal, that the Arabs declared every night set up an unearthly