90 JOURNEY TO CENTRAL AFRICA.

rais and pilot sleep on the roof of our cabin, where the latter sits all day, holding the long arm of the rudder, which projects forward over the cabin from the high end of the stern.

Our manner of life is simple, and might even be called monotonous, but we have never found the greatest variety of landscape and incident so thoroughly enjoyable. The scenery of the Nile, thus far, scarcely changes from day to day, in its forms and colors, but only in their disposition with regard to each other. The shores are either palm-groves, fields of cane and dourra, young wheat, or patches of bare sand, blown out from the desert. The villages are all the same agglomerations of mud-walls, the tombs of the Moslem saints are the same white ovens, and every individual camel and buffalo resembles its neighbor in picturesque ugliness. The Arabian and Libyan Mountains, now sweeping so far into the foreground that their yellow cliffs overhang the Nile, now receding into the violet haze of the horizon, exhibit little difference of height, hue, or geological formation. Every new scene is the turn of a kaleidoscope, in which the same objects are grouped in ' other relations, yet always characterized by the most perfect harmony. These slight, yet ever-renewing changes, are to us a source of endless delight. Either from the pure atmosphere, the healthy life we lead, or the accordant tone of our spirits, we find ourselves unusually sensitive to all the slightest touches, the most minute rays of that grace and harmony which bathes every landscape in cloudless sunshine. The various groupings of the palms, the shifting of the blue evening shadows on the rose-hued mountain walls, the green of the wheat and sugarcane, the windings of the great river, the alternations of wind and calm — each of these is enough to content us, and to give every