410 A TROPICAL DEPENDENCY this spot," he says, " were lying more than a hundred skeletons, some of them with the skin still remaining attached to the bone. The Arabs laughed heartily at my expression of horror, and said they were only blacks, nam boo (damn their father), and began knocking their limbs about with the butt end of their firelocks, saying : * This was a woman ! This was a youngster ! ' " As the road wound southwards skeletons were passed at the rate of eighty and ninety a day, and at the wells of El Hammar, three days farther on, the numbers of skeletons that lay about were countless. '* Those of two women, whose perfect and regular teeth bespoke them young, were particularly shocking; their arms still remained clasped round each other as they had expired, although the flesh had long since -perished by being exposed to the burning rays of the sun." On the following day, as Major Denham dozed on his horse about noon, overcome by the heat of the sun, he was suddenly awakened by *'a crashing under my feet, which startled me excessively. I found that my steed had, without any sensation of shame or alarm, stepped upon the perfect skeletons of two human beings, cracking their brittle bones under his feet, and by one trip of his foot separating from the trunk a skull which rolled on before him." Along the greater part of the way. Major Denham says that every few miles a skeleton was seen through the whole day. " Some were partially covered with sand, others with only a small mound formed by the wind ; one hand often lay under the head, and frequently both, as if in the act of compressing the head. The skin and membranous substance all shrivel up and dry from the state of the air : the thick muscular and external parts only decay." When it is remembered that this description applies in the beginning of the nineteenth century after Christ to a road which has been used for the same purpose of slave transit for perhaps as many as nineteen centuries before Christ, the imagination quails before the total of grief and suffering which must lie embedded in its dust.