PRODUCTS. 243 the Arabs have to contend with in preserving a giraffe alive, and it is, consequently, not to be wondered at that their price is so enormous. In Egypt, for example, at Cairo or Alexandria, a living specimen always costs from five to six hundred dollars.

There are not many leopards in this province ; the stragglers merely from the interior of Africa show themselves occasionally in Kordofan. They will sometimes approach the villages, but instances of their having done an injury to man are very rare. They mostly steal their prey from one of the herds, but immediately withdraw with it to their covert, but are by no means as bold as they may be in the more internal tracts of this and another quarter of the globe. They are not hunted, partly from want of fire-arms, partly because the skin, the only portion of value about them, is not much in request, and a leopard is very rarely, indeed, known to have been killed in any district. Hya?nas, of which there are said to be three varieties, are far more numerous. The striped species is the most common in Egvpt and SjTia; but the tiger-skinned hyaena is far larger, and if the third variety exist it has never come under my own observation. They form herds of ten or twenty animals, secrete themselves during the day in the caves and ravines of the neighbouring mountains, which they merely quit at night, when they go in quest of prey, and on these occasions they a 2