SIODT A BATH. 83 hind us, over the desert hills, wound the track of the yearly caravan from Dar-Fur and Kordofan. Our Arab guide pointed out a sandy plain, behind the cemetery of the Mamelukes, which lay at our feet, as the campiug-ground of the caravan, and tried to tell us how many thousand camels were assembled there. As we looked upon the superb plain, teeming with its glory of vegetable life and enlivened by the songs of the Arab ploughmen, a funeral procession came from the city and passed slowly to the burying-ground, accompanied by the dismal howling of a band of women. We went below and rode between the whitewashed domes covering the graves of the Mamelukes. The place was bright, clean and cheerful, in comparison with the other Arab burying-grounds we had seen. The grove which shades its northern wall stretches for more than a mile along the edge of the Desert — a picturesque avenue of palms, sycamores, fragrant acacias, mimosas and acanthus. The air around Siout is pregnant with the rich odor of the yellow mimosa-flowers, and one becomes exhilarated by breathing it.

The city has handsome bazaars and a large bath, built by Mohammed Bey Defterdar, the savage son-in-law of Mohammed Ali. The halls are spacious, supported by granite columns, and paved with marble. Little threads of water, scarcely visible in the dim, steamy atmosphere, shoot upward from the stone tanks, around which a dozen brown figures lie stretched in the lazy beatitude of the bath. I was given over to two Arabs, who scrubbed me to desperation, plunged me twice over head and ears in a tank of scalding water, and then placed me under a cold douche. "When the whole process, which occupied more than half an hour, was over, a cup of coffee and a pipe