A “GALLERY” WOOD. 379 time. Amongst them was a beautiful widow-bird, as black as velvet, and a new and very graceful pigeon, of which I had already obtained specimens in Janda. Small quadrupeds were also numerous. Hundreds of black Clausilia-like univalve shells of two species were lying upon the moss which covered the rocks in Khor Asa; curiously enough, all of them had lost the point of the spiral, and although I examined more than two hundred, I was not able to obtain a single perfect specimen. None of the inhabitants of the village could be seen, for, as Chief Ansea subsequently complained to me, the Abaka of Tomaya are of a rather intractable character.

I had been told that the station of Kudtirma was so far distant that two days’ march would be required to reach it; -we therefore collected our porters early, and before dawn, with the threatening comet above our heads, we descended the steep - declivity leading to Khor Anje, which was hidden in durrahfields. The ascent was just as steep and precipitate; then, marching along a ridge of hill, the rubble of which was thickly covered with white and yellow lichens, we enjoyed an extensive view over an exceedingly undulating and fertile land, in which were many high hills, whose naked outlines stood out above the green foliage like fortifications. Villages surrounded by their corn-fields lay in the depressions of the country far below us, often hidden by rolling veils of mist. The fresh cool morning air, the perfume of the plants and of the burnt-down grass, the echoing song of the birds, and the flashing golden tints of the rising sun combined to produce in the traveller a feeling of buoyancy.

I noticed in the steppe which we next passed through many groups of trees growing like islands in the broad expanse. The path led in the direction of what appeared from the distance to be a line of dwarf trees, but which were in reality the tops of trees which grew in a hollow, their summits only reaching to the level of the plain. A very deep descent revealed the wonders of a “ gallery” wood growing in a great depression, of the same character as those so often seen in the south. The trunks of the trees rose to a height of some hundred or hundred and thirty feet before their crowns unfolded.

- One of these “gallery” woods, through which Khor Modzua