462 JOURNEY TO CENTRAL AFRICA.

The banks were almost perpendicular, but covered with a rich growth of halfeh, which our camels greedily cropped, at the hazard of losing their balance and tumbling down into the river. I fancied there was already a taste of Egypt in the mountain air, and flattered myself that I had breathed the last of the languid atmosphere of Soudan.

The next morning led us deeper into the rocky chaos. The bed of the Nile was properly a gorge, so deep was it sunk among the stony hills, and confined within such narrow limits.

The ridges of loose blocks of granite and porphyry roll after each other like waves, and their crests assume the most fantastic variety of forms. They are piled in heaps and balanced on each other, topped' with round boulders or thrown together in twos and threes, as if some brood of Titan children had been at play in those regions and were frightened away in the midst of their employment. It is impossible to lose the impression that some freak of human or superhuman fancy gave the stones their quaint grouping. Between the ridge's are fihallow hollows, terminating towards the west in deep, rocky rdefts, and opening on the river in crescent-like coves, between the jaggy headlands which tumble their boulders into its bed.

High peaks, or rather conical piles of porphyry rock, rise here and there out of this sterile chaos. Toward the east, where the Nile winds away in a long chain of mazy curves, they form ranges and show compact walls and pinnacles. The few palms and the little eddies of wheat sprinkled along both banks of the river, are of a glorious depth and richness of hue, by contrast with the gray and purple wastes of the hills. In the sweet, clear air of the morning, the scenery was truly inspiring, and I rode over the high ridges in a mood the very opposite of that I had felt the day previous.