482 JOURNEY TO CENTRAL AFRICA.

hills, taking liim, Mohammed and Ali, and leaving the other man to go on with the baggage camels. We wandered for some time over the rough ridges, and at last reached a spur of the hills which Achmet took to be Abou-Seer, but which was not it. I was so hungry that I stopped for breakfast, and before I had finished, Ali, who was overflowing with joy at the idea of reaching Wadi Haifa, came to me with the news that he had been climbing a high point, whence he could see the end of the mountains. The Nile, beyond, he said, was broad and smooth, and there were more date-trees than he had seen since leaving Sukkot. I left him to ride my Abou-Sin, and walked on to the peak he had climbed. As I reached its base, however, I saw that the true headland projected still further beyond, terminating in a cone-like summit. As I came out from among the hills behind it, the view suddenly opened before me far to the north and east, and I saw the long date groves of Wadi Haifa apparently at my feet.

Abou-Seer is a cliff of calcareous rock, and its base is completely covered with the names of tourists who have visited it. Achmet wanted me to add my name to theirs, but as I had brought no hammer and chisel from Cairo, like most travellers, I could not gratify him. A few steps took me to the summit of the cliff, which drops on the eastern side in a sheer precipice to the water's edge. It is at least three hundred feet in perpendicular height, and as it forms the corner of the range, the view on three sides is uninterrupted for many leagues, The panorama is truly grand, and probably unlike any other in the world. To the south the mountains of the Batn El-Hadjar rise like a black wall, out of which the Nile forces its way, not in a broad sheet, but in a hundred vexed streams,