196 JOURNEY TO CENTRAL AFRICA.

large, tall, full-limbed, with open, warm, intelligent faces and lustrous Hack eyes. They dress with more neatness than the Egyptian Fellahs, and their long hair, though profusely smeared with suet, is arranged with some taste and clothes their heads better than the dirty cotton skull-cap. Among those I saw at Abou-Hammed were two youths of about seventeen, who were wonderfully beautiful. One of them played a sort of coarse reed flute, and the other a rude stringed instrument, which he called a tambour. He was a superb fellow, with the purest straight Egyptian features, and large, brilliant, melting black eyes. Every posture of his body expressed a grace the most striking because it was wholly unstudied. I have never seen human forms superior to these two. The first, whom I named the Apollo Ababdese, joined my caravan, for the journey to Berber. He carried with him all his wealth — a flute, a sword, and a heavy shield of hippopotamus hide. His features were as perfectly regular as the Greek, but softer and rounder in outline. His limbs were without a fault, and the light poise of his head on the slender neck, the fine play of his shoulderblades and the muscles of his back, as he walked before me, wearing only a narrow cloth around his loins, would have charmed a sculptor's eye. He walked among my camel-drivers as Apollo might have walked among the other shepherds of King Admetus. Like the god, his implement was the flute ; he was a wandering minstrel, and earned his livelihood by playing at the festivals of the Ababcleha. His name was Eesa, the Arabic for Jesus. I should have been willing to take several shades of his complexion if I could have had with them his perfect ripeness, roundness and symmetry of body and limb. He told me that he smoked no tobacco and drank no ara-