ABAB TILLAGE. 33

What a waking in the divine dawn of beauteous, freest Nature I Much restored, two hours before sunrise, we mounted our drome-

daries, but did not long trust ourselves in the sun, as at his first beams we dismounted at the tents of some Arabs of the Kabyle of

the Kammarabs. We were hospitably received, and entertained

with milk and bread ; ere long they brought us a great wooden

dish (gadda) of the lochma, a stiff soup or batter of durra- meal (hagien), with a hollow in its centre full of butter, and, even when only eaten with the hands, no bad food. At least

a dozen men would have found sufficient to eat in this Arab po-

lenta. The baker's oven, or brick-kilnlike tents (birsch ; tents of

canvass, gemma ; those on boats, denda), are formed of mats of

palm-leaves, stretched over boughs, low before but high at the

back, where there is a sort of elevated bed-place, or divan,

covered with palm mats, and over these a kind of reed-stalks, split

fine, is bound by small stripes of hide. This elevation, when used

as a bed or seat, is protected from cold wind and curiosity, by

being hung round by black and white striped coarse woollen

coverlets, and this part of the tent is called the beit, or house. Of

such tents some thirty were here, not placed in the shade, but somewhat distant from the larger trees. In the time of the tropical

rains these tents are much i-educed in size by their inmates, who

then sit in them like snails in their shells. Such rains do not ex-

tend beyond the mouth of the forest-surrounded Atbara, and seldom

bestow a shower on the Berber lands (called by the Arabs el Mucheirof ), where the loam-built towns would soon go to pieces under the torrents of the Charilf, which the tokuls are needed to

withstand. The older and principal men came to visit us, and the Wokul of the Sheik, who is in attendance on the Pascha, smoked

out of a bone. The country round is flat, sandy, and covered with thorn-bushes. The Dom-palms do not extend so far from the

river, as they love a moist soil. Grass and herbage we saw as

little of as stones, although the river seemed to overflow far here. A slirub, Tundo, with many small red flowers, very similar to our

wild rose, was abundant ; birds, save pigeons, very rare ; but nu- merous large white vultures, hovering over and devouring the

fallen cattle it left behind, marked the way the army had taken.

Towards evening we again were en route, following the track of

D