136 FROM BINDER, AND NILE TO NILE minate as the Arab song is, and the last one came on from invisible distance, articulate, tiny, and far.

But it was weirder still when their singing ceased, and one could only hear, and that hardly, the soft pad of one's own camel sliding silently under one, all other footsteps being inaudible even in the stillness of the night.

Yet the tense silence was not quite unbroken ; in the most desolate places there seems to be life. Here and there the crickets chirped, and the nightbirds sometimes called, while the cry of the foul hy£ena, wandering like a hopeless evil spirit, broke upon our ears and reminded us of other travellers by night who are neither seen nor heard till their chosen moment comes.

Here is the home of great loneliness ; the country is foreign and strange, and the hour is eerie. Human dread of dead silence and darkness is born of the imminence of the unknown. This is all round one, and in the undefined bushes at one's feet, or those shadowy forms which seem to move in the course of one's progress, there lies a weird spirit of threat and of mystery.

Approaching a tree, in the branches of which a few spots where the blackness is thicker are dimly discerned, the very fury of sound seems let loose ; to all points of the compass it spreads, yet diminishes quickly, leaving the world to its silence again. It was merely the guinea-fowl roosting, and escaping the too near approach of mankind.

Of necessity the morning start was early, for at