The " Saphiar when necessary, bvit popular among the crew. At the time or the Crhnean war lie was on board an Egyptian frigate. All the ports of the Black Sea were well knoAvn to him, and since I had also gone throng! i the Crimean campaign and knew all those ports and the long Circassian coast, we had means of whiling away many hours in talking of past times. He treated the crew with gentleness and even familiarity, and they loved him.

The African nights on the Upper Nile are generally clear, but the cries of birds and blowing of hippopotami are incessant. We saw the latter raise their heads from the water a hundred yards from the vessel to disappear immediately afterwards. I shot at them with some success, but they plunged under water to die at a greater distance. In some places I could see as many as fifty in one group. The crocodiles were less frequent than in the neighbourhood of Berber and Khartoum. There were innumerable flocks of the //.s, a kind of stork which the Egyptians regard with superstitious veneration, and infinite were the varieties of white, grey, and black sea-gulls.

Friday, thine 6th. — We left Menazir this morning at seven o'clock. The sky was cloudy, a tempest imminent. We had not yet finished drawing up the anchor when the hurricane broke out, accompanied by thunder and lightning. Part of the covering of the nugar blew away, and the Sai')ltia not having had recourse to the screw soon enough, ran aground on a sand-bank. The man who has never seen an African storm cannot form an idea of it — hundreds of luminous sparks flash at the same time from every side in all directions. The terrible noise of the thunder never ceases for an instant, while Avith extraordinary rapidity, from the fall of torrents of rain, the traveller finds himself surrounded by a veritable iimndation. 1 witnessed similar hurricanes several times, but never of such a force as the one that overtook us when we left Mena/ir. The water which fell on the deck had no