474 JOURNEY TO CENTRAL AFRICA.

hard existence, half buried in sand and choked with the old leaves, which the natives axe too idle to prune. The people were in the fields, cutting some wheat which was just ripe, and two sakias, shaded by clusters of palms, watered a few patches of cotton. I made inquiries, but had much difficulty in finding the location of the hot springs. Finally, one of the men consented to become my guide in the morning, and conducted us to a camping-ground, where there was a little grass for the camels. Lured by the promise of backsheesh, he brought me the leanest of young sheep, which I purchased for eight piastres. The night was calm, cool and delicious, and steeped my whole frame in balm, after the burning day. The moon, nearly full, shone with a gray and hazy lustre, and some insect that shrilled like a tree-toad, reminded me of home.

Our Bailee guide, Hadji Mohammed, as he was called, from having made two pilgrimages to Mecca, was on hand before sunrise. Starting in advance of the caravan, I walked along the river-bank, towards a castellated building on an eminence which I had noticed the previous evening, while sketching the landscape. My path was over huge beds of gray granite, from which the old Egyptians might have cut obelisks of a single block, not only one hundred, but five hundred feet in length. The enormous masses which had been separated from these beds and rolled into rounded masses by the chafing of primeval floods, lay scattered on the surface, singly, or piled in fantastic groups. The building was a large fortress of stones and clay, with massive walls, on the summit of an island-like peak overhanging the river, and separated from the bank by a deep chasm, which is filled with water" during the inundations, but was then dry, and its sides green with wheat