APPEARANCE OF THE COUNTRY. 395 or two, we rode over dry, stony plains, covered with thickets of the small thorny mimosa and patches of long yellow grass. The country is crossed by deep gullies, through which the streams formed by the summer rains flow to the Nile. Their banks are lined with a thick growth of sont, nebbuk, and other trees peculiar to Central Africa, in which many lions make their lairs and prey upon the flocks of the Arabs. One bold, fierce fellow had established himself on the island of Musakar Bey, just below the junction of the Nile, and carried off nightly a sheep or calf, defying the attempts of the natives to take him. Our view was confined to the thorns, on whose branches we left many shreds of clothing as mementoes of the journey, and to the barren range of Djebel Gerrari, stretching westward into the Desert. Occasionally, however, in crossing the low spurs which ran out from . this chain, the valley "of the Nile — the one united Nile again — lay before us, far to the east and north-east, the river glistening in the sun as he spread his arms round island after island, till his lap could hold no more. The soil is a poor, coarse gravel, and the inhabitants support themselves by their herds of sheep and goats, which browse on the thorns. In places there are large thickets of the usher, or euphorbia, twenty feet high. It grows about the huts of the natives, who make no attempt to exterminate it, notwithstanding the poisonous nature of its juice. Every mile or two we passed a large Arab burying-ground, crowded with rough head and foot-stones, except where white pennons, fluttering on poles, denoted a more than ordinary sanctity in the deceased. The tomb of the Shekh, or holy man of Merreh, was a conical structure of stones and clay, about fifteen feet in breadth at the base, and twenty feet high. The graves are so