A WOODING STATION. 165 Half an hour’s steaming brought us to the wood-station, a thick forest of considerable extent, on the edge of which, close by the lake shore, Boki’s people have erected their huts. Here, in spite of all our foresight and precautions, we had a bad night of it; a kind of cyclone raged from midnight till morning, and several times made us anxious about the steamer. Harly next morning all hands were got to work at felling trees, and the inhabitants of the place rendered first rate service with their boats in getting the wood on board the Khedive. From here the eastern shore of the lake was pretty plainly visible as a chain of hills having a north-south axis. When the mist cleared off, we also saw another distinct mountain mass, situated farther north, the middle of which bore east by south (103°); this I concluded was Jebel Geisi, near Kiréto. An expedition into the forest on shore did not reward us for our trouble, and we were soon compelled by the buffaloes to return.

The trees we felled in this locality were mostly Diospyros mespiiformis, an excellent material for firing purposes, and one that is greatly liked for building. It has a fresh reddish colour and a pleasant smell; when felled, it soon assumes a beautiful darker tint. It resists the attacks of termites pretty well, yet it did not answer, wo found, for boatbuilding; but it serves excellently for making gunstocks, especially when it has been buried for some time in the ground. I also observed another sweet-smelling species of timber amongst the firewood brought on board, but I could not ascertain from what tree it came. I am inclined to think that it was a species of Vitex. All along the river and in the lake I was struck with the relatively small number of species of water-birds. Farther north, in the Bahr-el-Abiad, between 12° and 15° N. lat., water-birds and marsh-birds occur in innumerable flocks, while to the south, in the localities mentioned, one cannot find a single duck or goose; and although we can explain this very marked difference during the winter season (November to March) by the fact that large numbers of European emigrants on their way to the south do not proceed beyond the marshy tract between Sobat and Ghaba Shambé, still this will not account for the paucity of species, and for the small number of