408 JOURNEY TO CENTRAL AFRICA.

moustaches and beards, and carried spears in their handa.

They looked at us with suspicion, hut did not refuse the customary " hab-bab-ba ! " The wells were merely pits, not more than four or five feet deep, dug in the clayey soil, and containing at the bottom a constant supply of cool, sweet water. We watered our camels in basins scooped for that purpose in the earth, and then took breakfast under the thorns. Among the trees in the wady was one resembling the nebbuk in foliage, and with a fruit similar in appearance, but larger and of different flavor. The Arabs called it laloom, and gathered some of the fruit for me to taste. It has a thin, brittle outer rind, containing a hard stone, covered with a layer of gummy paste, most intensely sweet and bitter in the mouth. It has precisely the flavor of the medicine known to children as Hive Syrup, We resumed our course along the wady, nearly to its termination at the foot of the mountains, when the road turned to the right over another succession of hard, gravelly ridges, flanked on the west by hills of coal-black porphyry. During the afternoon the wind was sometimes as hot as a furnaceblast, and I felt my very blood drying up in its intensity. I had no means of ascertaining the temperature, but it could not have been less than 105°. Nevertheless, the sky was so clear and blue, the sunshine so perfect, and the Desert so inspiring that I was in the most exulting mood. In fact, the powerful dry heat of the air produced upon me a bracing effect, similar to that of sharp cold. It gave me a sensation of fierce, savage vigor, and I longed for an Arab lance and the fleet hoofs of the red stallion I had left in Khartoum. At times the burning blasts were flavored with a strong aromatic odor, like that of dried lavender, which was as stimulating to the lungs as