40 SCORPIONS.

and stony plain, with a few stunted mimosa-bushes growing here and there. The heat, too, was very great, and we saw no game. The next two days' journeys, however, were even more trying. We had thought the country could not become uglier or more monotonous to traverse ; but we soon found that it could, — a perfectly level stretch of country to our right, terminating in the horizon to our left, and in front of us a range of hillocks, at a distance of some ten or twelve miles.

We occasionally crossed a k/ior bordered with a few bushes and sickly-looking -palms ; the heat being intense, with a total absence of shade. For miles we passed over country without a bush, and covered with a perpetual mirage ; then we would come to a strip on which grew a few dwarf mimosa bushes. In parts the desert was covered with loose stones : as we neared Cassala, however, this gave place to a fine loamy soil, which, no doubt, with rain would be very fertile. Once we passed through what had been, after the rains, a //?/rm-field.

Of animal life, we came across a few guinea-fowl, and saw a fine buck ariel, the first of the species we had seen since passing the herd near Souakim.

While the camels were being laden, we observed a kind of butcher-bird perch itself on the back of one of the camels, and make three darts, one after the other, for something hidden between the bags with which the animal was laden ; at its third dart, the bird fished up a scorpion, with which it flew off in great satisfaction, to devour it at its leisure. Although we often came across scorpions, we were fortunate in never being bitten by any of them ourselves. Some of our servants, however, who slept on the ground, were not so lucky; and Ali the cook was so badly bitten by one that the place did not heal for weeks. On the Cassala road we found a villanously ugly lizard, that lived in dead wood, and which the natives declared to be poisonous.