442 JOURNEY TO CENTRAL AFRICA.

sels. I rode past the town, which does not contain more than thirty houses in all, and had my tent pitched on the river bank.

The Nile is here half a mile broad, and a long reach of his current is visible to the north and south. The opposite bank was high and steep, lined at the water's edge with a belt of beans and lupins, behind which rose a line of palms, and still, higher the hills of pale, golden-hued sand, spotted like a leopard's hide, with clumps of a small mimosa. The ground was a clear, tawny yellow, but the spots were deep emerald. Below the gorgeous drapery of these hills, the river glittered in a dark, purple-blue sheet. The coloring of the mid- African landscapes is truly unparalleled. To me, it became more than a simple sense; it grew to be an appetite. When, after a journey in the Desert, I again beheld the dazzling green palms and wheat-fields of the Nile, I imagined that there was a positive sensation on the retina. I felt, or seemed to feel, physically, the colored rays — beams of pure emerald, topaz and amethystine lustre — as they struck the eye. At Edabbe I first made acquaintance with a terrible pest, which for many days afterwards occasioned me much torment — a small black fly, as venomous as the musquito, and much more difficult to drive away. I sat during the evening with my head, neck and ears closely bound up, notwithstanding the heat. After the flies left, a multitude of beetles, moths, winged ants and other nameless creatures came in their place. I sat and sweltered, murmuring for the waters of Abana and Pharpar, rivers of Damascus, and longing for a glass of sherbet cooled with the snows of Lebanon.

We were up with the first glimmering of dawn. The sky