A WILDERNESS OF STONES. 475 and beans. Wild douni-pahns, hanging heavy with green fruit, grew in the patches of soil among the rocks and overhung the ravine. The fortress was a very picturesque object, with its three square towers, backed by the roaring flood and the dark violet-blue crags of Djebel Meme behind. The forms of the landscape — except the palms — were all of the far North, but the coloring was that of the ripe and glowing South. -I was so absorbed in the scene, that the caravan passed unnoticed, having taken a path further from the river. After wandering about for some time, I climbed one of the granite piles and scanned the country in all directions, but could see nothing.

Finally I descried a distant trail, and on reaching it, recognized the tracks of my camels. I hurried on, and in half an hour met Hadji Mohammed and one of my camel-men, coming back in great tribulation, fearful that I Avas lost.

Near the Cataract of Dal, an akaba commences, which extends to the village of Ukme, in the Batn el-Hadjar, a distance of about fifteen miles. We passed behind some peaks of black porphyry, whose shoulders were covered with steep, sliding drifts of yellow sand, and travelled on through a wilderness of stones. All the refuse odds and ends of Creation — the pieces left after the rocks and mountains of the rest of the world were fashioned — have been thrown together here. It was a sea of black stone-mounds, out of which rose occasional peaks of still blacker stone. Through this we passed into a region of gray stone and then into another of red stone, journeying for four hours up one mound and down another, by paths and no paths, which were most laborious for our camels.

I began to be fearful we should never get out of the geological labyrinth into which the hadji conducted us, but the majestic