NUBIAN SCENERY. 163 cooked in different styles, for dinner — partly as an earnest of his skill, and partly to dispel my want of spirits. But the fragrant pipe which followed dinner was the true promoter of patience, and " Patience," says the Arah poet, " is the key of Content." My boat was a small, slow craft, and Rais Hereedee, the captain, the most indolent of Nubians. His weak, feminine face showed a lack of character, which Achmet soon turned to advantage, by taking the command into his own hands. The wind was barely strong enough to obviate the necessity of towing, and my three sailors sat on the bow all day, singing: " anderbuddee ! anderbuddee ! " as we lazily ascended the river.

Those who do not go beyond Thebes are only half acquainted with the Nile. Above Esneh, it is no longer a broad, lazy current, watering endless fields of wheat and groves of palm, bounded in the distance by level lines of yellow mountain-walls.

It is narrower, clearer and more rapid, and its valley, after the first scanty field of wheat or dourra, strikes the foot of broken and rocky ranges, through the gaps in which the winds of the Desert have spilled its sands. There is not the same pale, beautiful monotony of color, but the landscapes are full of striking contrasts, and strongly accented lights and shadows.

Here, in Nubia, these characteristics are increased, and the Nile becomes a river of the North under a Southern sun. The mountains rise on either hand from the water's edge ; piles of dark sandstone or porphyry rock, sometimes a thousand feet in height, where a blade of grass never grew, every notch and jag on their crests, every fissure on their sides, revealed in an atmosphere so pure and crystalline, that nothing but one of our cloudless mid-winter days can equal it. Their hue near at