LIFE ON DAHABIEHS. 33 often aground and hardly ever two nights running on the same boat. Sometimes they shifted us on to steamers, at other times we were jammed up in small dahabiehs, but the method of proceeding was pleasant and not fatiguing. For want of something better to do we took to shaving off our beards, and one after another apparent stranger came up from below minus the chin-covering that had graced (?) his face for the last nine months. It is extraordinary how a beard alters the whole face. Parke, our doctor who replaced Magill, we had never seen clean-shaved, and when I had helped him to carve the hair off, I literally iad to introduce him to the others. They thought he ras an intruder of some sort.

Occasionally, in fact very often, one of the boats stuck, and then everybody, stripped to his helmet, waded out and hauled away till something happened, either the rope broke or the boat moved. The pilots seemed to be trying how many sand-banks they could run us on to in a given time ; hardly a day passed without our striking on something.

Towards sunset every evening the dahabiehs or