A RACE INTO THE DESEKT. 311 our speed, that an hour had passed before I was cool enough to notice where we were going. The Consul finally called out to me to stop, and I complied, sharing the savage resistance of Sultan, who neighed and plunged with greater ardor than at the start. The minarets of Khartoum had long since disappeared ; we were in the centre of a desolate, sandy plain, broken here and there by clumps of stunted mimosas — a dreary landscape, but glorified by the sunshine and the delicious air. We rode several miles on the return track, before we met the pursuing attendants, who had urged their dromedaries into a gallop, and were sailing after us like a flock of ostriches.

A few days after my arrival, we had the dromedaries saddled and rode to Kereff, a village on the Blue Nile, about two leagues distant. The path was over a wide plain, covered with dry grass, and resembling an Illinois prairie after a long drought. In the rainy season it is green and luxuriant with grass and a multitude of flowers. The only trees were the savage white thorn of the Desert, until we approached the river, where we found forests of the large euphorbia, which I had first noticed as a shrub in Upper Egypt. It here became a tree, upwards of twenty feet in height. The branches bent over my head, as I rode through on the Consul's tallest dromedary. The trees were all in blossom, and gave out a subtle, sickening odor. The flowers appear in whorls around the stem, at the base of the leaves ; the corolla is entire, but divided into five points, white in the centre, with a purple stain at the extremity. The juice of this plant is viscid and milky, and the Arabs informed me that if a single drop of it gets into the eye it will produce instant blindness.

Beyond these thickets extended patches of wheat and cot-