472 JOURNEY TO CENTRAL AFRICA.

hundred miles south of the Second Cataract is termed. With each day the road became more rough and toilsome, and my camels moved more languidly. In spite of the fatigue which we all endured, I felt so much strengthened by our free life and so much interested in the remarkable country through which, we were passing, that I felt something like regret on approaching the southern limit of travel on the Nile. Not so my dragoman and servant, who could not enough thank God and the Prophet for having taken them in safety through countries which they deemed the verge of the world. Achmet positively declared he would never make the trip again, for no second journey could be equally fortunate. My camel-men, I found, had never before travelled to Wadi Haifa by the western bank, but by a wonderful Arab instinct, they never went astray from the road.

The B.atn El-Hadjar marks its commencement by a range of granite hills, which break the river into a foaming cataract.

After leaving camp, our road lay along the Nile, behind some high sand-hills. In front of us appeared Djebel Ufeer, a peak about fifteen hundred feet in height, its naked sides tinted of a deep, rich purple hue by the glowing air. The Nile flows directly towards its base, making a slight curve, as if to pass it on the eastern side, but finding the granite rocks heaped together too thickly, changes its course and washes the western foot of the mountain. The granite lies scattered about in vast masses, taking all sorts of quaint and fanciful shapes. The hills themselves are merely collections of boulders of all sizes, from three to twenty feet in diameter, piled on an enormous bed or stratum of the same. Intermixed with this are beds of a rich yellowish-red granite, which crops out under the piles