SCENE OF THE MURDER AT HEBBEH. 213 Two crossing-places were worked at the same time, and fifty boats were employed for each crossing, which was made down-stream and represented a distance of about 400 yards, the camels and horses being towed across with ropes to their heads; the horses swimming freely, the camels, who are not swimmers, floating on their sides with their heads held out of the water by the tow-ropes. Only three camels and one donkey were lost, and the crossing was otherwise effected without any serious accident.

Abu Bekr, the uncle of Suleiman Wad Gamr, had been compelled to go with the column; and now that they had come to Hebbeh, the scene of the murder of Colonel Stewart, was in mortal fear that he would be executed on the spot. Of course there was no such intention, and he was soon able to point out the house of Fakri Wad Etman, a native house of mud with an entrance into a small courtyard, on one side of which stood the house. It was not here, however, that Colonel Stewart and his companions would have been received, since this was the abode of the women. The murder must have taken place in the Salaamlik, or guest-chamber—a detached mud hut of one room only about fifty yards from the dwelling-house. General Brackenbury says: " We entered this small room, stooping to pass under the low doorway, with feelings of awe. But there was nothing to remind us of the terrible tragedy that had taken place there six months before. There were no signs of blood. The floor and all the ground round the hut had been carefully strewn with fine sand." A hundred yards in front of the door, on the river bank, stood the group of palms where some of Stewart's party had' been attacked and killed according to the account given by the stoker Hassein. Before visiting this house, which was one of the first group of such buildings in Hebbeh, General Brackenbury and several ofiicers had inspected the wreck of the steamer about four hundred yards up stream. The vessel was impaled on a large rock about two hundred yards from the proper right bank of the river. She was a much larger vessel than they had supposed her to be, measuring seventy feet from stem to stern and twenty-two feet in breadth over her paddles, the depth of her hold was four