74 JOURNEY TO CENTRAL AFRICA.

were not represented, and out of revenge fired at a company of huge pelicans, who were seated on a sand-bank The drum and tambourine kept lively time to the voices of our sailors, as we approached Minyeh, the second large town on the river, and the capital of a Province. But the song this time had a peculiar significance. After the long-drawn sound, something between a howl and a groan, which terminated it, we were waited upon by a deputation, who formally welcomed us to the city. We responded by a backsheesh of twenty-five piastres, and the drum rang louder than ever. We stayed in Minyeh long enough to buy a leg of mutton, and then sailed for the tombs of Beni-Hassan. The wind left us as we reached a superb palm-grove, which for several miles skirts the foot of Djebel Shekh Timay. The inhabitants are in bad odor, and in addition to our own guard, we were obliged to take two men from the village, who came armed with long sticks and built a fire on the bank, beside our vessel. This is a regulation of the Government, to which travellers usually conform, but I never saw much reason for it. We rose at dawn and wandered for hours through the palms, to the verge of the Desert. When within two or three miles of the mountain of Beni-Hassan, we provided ourselves with candles, water-flasks and weapons, and set off in advance of our boat. The Desert here reached the Nile, terminating in a bluff thirty to forty feet in height, which is composed of layers of pebbles and shelly sand, apparently the deposit of many successive floods. I should have attributed this to the action of the river, cutting a deeper channel from year to year, but I believe it is now acknowledged that the bed of the Nile is gradually rising, and that the yearly inun dation covers a much wider space than in the time of the Pha-