THE SCENERY OF MERAWE. 425 fore the Turks got possession of the country. It was wholly dilapidated, but a few Arab families were living in the stona dwellings which surround it. These clusters of shattered buildings extend for more than a mile along the river, and ara all now known as Merawe. Our road led between fields of ripening wheat, rolling in green billows before the breeze, on one side, and on the other, not more than three yards distant, the naked sandstone walls of the Desert, where a blade of grass never grew. Over the wheat, along the bank of the Nile, rose a long forest of palms, so thickly ranged that the eye could scarcely penetrate their dense, cool shade ; while on the other hand the glaring sand-hills showed their burning shoulders above the bluffs. It was a most violent contrast, and yet, withal, there was a certain harmony in these opposite features. A remarkably fat man, riding on a donkey, met us. The Shekh compared him to a hippopotamus, and said that his fat came from eating mutton and drinking om bilbil day and night, At the end of the town we came to a sort of guard-house, shaded by two sycamores. A single soldier was in attendance, and apparently tired of having nothing to do, as he immediately caught his donkey and rode with us to Djebel Berkel.

We now approached the mountain, which is between three and four miles from the town. It rises from out the sands of the Nubian Desert, to the height of five hundred feet, presenting a front completely perpendicular towards the river. It is inaccessible on all sides except the north, which in one place has an inclination of 45°. Its scarred and shattered walls of naked standstone stand up stern and sublime in the midst of the hot and languid landscape. As we approached, a group of pyramids appeared on the brow of a sand-hill to the left, and I