following them

A GIGANTIC RAY.

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foot along the coast, when they made us a sign to come near, and pointed to a spot where our inexperienced eyes at first failed to perceive anything but a greyish mass, floating close to the water's edge. It was a huge ray, perhaps five yards long, which, almost stranded, was devouring the small fish which people the shore. The Arabs hemmed in the monster very adroitly, and as our only fishing-rods were our revolvers, we pushed our dromedaries into the water up to their girths, and were just about to fire at the fish within a yard of it, when it made a tremendous bound, and swam out into the open sea, to the general surprise.

Fishing with pistols on dromedary-back is, it must be confessed, a novel sport. Our attention was soon attracted from our discomfiture by the sight at a very short distance of a great number of little silver fish, which were fluttering over the water, disappearing and reappearing farther off, like a cloud of butterflies. This singular spectacle was explained by the presence of the larger fish which prey upon these little creatures, which thus try to put the enemy off their track, and escape from pursuit. At this part of the gulf, we came opposite to a charming little island, on which are to be seen the ruins of a strong castle, and

a tolerably well-preserved convent. The island is called Kourieh. It was It was an important strategical point formerly, at the time when the gulf of Abakah was more frequented, and served as a passage for all the caravans coming from Arabia and India. Unfortunately it is now the centre of operations for the sharks, and many accidents have happened there through the imprudence of travellers who would persist in swimming from the shore to the island. We bathed there, but with the utmost precaution. This was our penultimate stage before arriving at Abakah, and our impatience induced us to pass too quickly by this charming portion of the gulf, which well deserves more leisurely examination. The mountains, whose slopes stretch downwards into the sea, are most imposing in their grand horizontal lines, for they are no longer the angular summits, the yawning scarred rocks of the wadis, but immense plateaux laid one upon the other, from whence fall showers of sand, which looks at a distance like snow, so brilliant is its whiteness. The pink colouring of the ground, the pearl grey and tender green of the bushes, give the landscape a wondrously harmonious aspect. There we saw for the first time a kind of palm-tree which bears a thousand branches grafted into a single

STATE BOUNDARIES.

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trunk, and which produces a kind of almond which we vainly endeavoured to eat, but to which the Arabs attribute the gift of preservation against sickness, and especially against the evil eye.

We were arriving at the end of our journey, and we had no eyes except for the other side of the gulf, on which we could trace the city of Abakah afar off, defined against a magnificent grove of palm-trees. Our attention was, however, forcibly diverted by strange heaps of stones symmetrically ranged across the path which we were following.

The stones are laid thus by the Arabs, as.additional landmarks between their respective little states, in a country where the mountains touch the sky, and form impassable barriers between the tribes.

Having jumped over these card-board fences, we ceased to be under the safeguard of the scheik who had accompanied us thus far. We were entering upon a new territory, and we were about to have to reckon with new authorities both military and civil, of a much more serious character. To have overturned one of these little party-walls would have been a pretext sufficient to bring about a declaration of war, and to have given the signal for sanguinary reprisals all over the country. As may be supposed, we treated the

trumpery barriers, all this having been explained to us, with profound respect.

At this point of our journey, our dragoman, having taken possession of a bottle of brandy that had fallen out of the canteen, which had slipped from its moorings on the side of one of the baggage camels, got profoundly drunk, and took us into his confidence with respect to his intentions of robbing the travellers, quite conscientiously and allowably, of course; and also, of not paying the camel-drivers. He also reposed in us inconceivable confidences respecting his private life, during which entertainment he was protected by the god of drunkards, for he was several times within an ace of tumbling off his dromedary.

We had kept all the way along the edge of the sea, and had now reached the extremity of the gulf. Since morning we had been gazing at the palm-grove in which the village of Abakah is half hidden, as if it were the Promised Land, and no stage of our journey had ever seemed so long as this one.

Well, we arrived at last.

Scheik Mohammed Gadd-The Son of an Independent Scheik--A String of Red Arabs--Flowers and Scents.

ABAKAH is undoubtedly that point in all our desert journey which has left the deepest impression upon us, by the wild and picturesque character of everything about it, from the many-coloured costumes of its inhabitants to its strange buildings framed in such wonderful surroundings.

Before us lay the blue sea, with palm-trees descending to the verge of its transparent waves, in a rich growth which reminded us of the most thickly-wooded portions of Fayoum; and earthen dwellings built in regular lines, with doors surmounted by ornaments in an almost barbarous Arab style. We found the types of the population were different from any that we had yet seen; the men being tall and strong, wearing their long red robes gracefully; with a black

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