followed him about everywhere. On the march, when Snowball approached the camels, on whose sides hung the cages of the fowls, there was general rejoicingcries, crowings, cluckings, to which he responded by opening still more widely his never shut mouth. The hour of slaughter was the same as that of feeding, so that the fowls hustled each other out of the way to get to him. It was extremely comic to behold this functionary with a kitchen knife in one hand, and a bag of corn in the other, distributing life and death at his capricious will to the creatures who loved him. There is a picture to be made out of the scene, and Sophocles would have turned it into a tragedy. Taib, taib, ketir, were the only words which we ever heard issue from Snowball's huge grinning mouth, ornamented with two great thick lips which had never met each other, but each of which formed a raised pathway from one ear to the other. Achmet, our cook, was tall and thin, dumb as the Sphinx, and having, like him, lost his nose. His chief characteristic was a charming one-he was an excellent cook. And now, as you know all about us, forward!

At first the Desert was frightfully arid and dreary; not an atom of vegetation brightened up the tawny

02

and grey shades of the sands through which we plodded in the direction of the mountains.

In its general configuration, the Sinaitic peninsula orms a singular agglomeration of mountainous chains, running almost parallel one with the other, and which meet in a kind of cluster at the extremity of the peninsula. Between each of these gigantic walls, placed in such strange juxtaposition by nature, are the natural beds of the torrents that originate in the rains or in the melting of snow. These narrow valleys, which are just like corridors, are called by the Arabs wadis. The word 'valley' does not accurately reproduce the sense of the Arab word, considering the narrowness of the passage which the traveller has to thread for a space of sometimes several kilometres. The light, striking only the horizontal planes presented by the fretted sides of the two mountains, gives these ravines the same partially dark effect as that of a cellar which depends on a long slit for daylight. The power of sound is extraordinary in these wadis; the strange multiplied echoes enabled us to make, with very little effort, noise enough for an entire population. For two days, while labouring through sand and pebbles, we kept these magnificent mountain chains in sight; but they seemed to retreat before us as if

they were in a mirage, and our joy was great indeed when we entered the first of the series of corridors. Wadi Beiyanah was the first into which we plunged. It was noon; the tent-shade was arranged, and we went to breakfast, enjoying the satisfaction of believing ourselves lost to all the rest of mankind, when a chattering of human voices roused us from our illusion. Our baggage camels and our camp were not to join us until much later, and we were quite at a loss to what to attribute these unexpected sounds. At length, at the furthest end of the wadi in which we had seated ourselves, three umbrellas became visible. Under the shade of the three parasols were three Englishmen, and one Englishwoman who had a fine complexion. As they passed us we exchanged the customary European salutation, and we saw that they were certain islanders who had been determined to catch us up since Suez, but who had not calculated on the speed of our coursers; so that we had twice left them far behind. We had supposed the road to be so easy to find, that we had loosed our poor little dog. But the road was soon to change. The wadi, hitherto very narrow, suddenly assumed a totally novel appearance. The way in which the two peaks of the mountains flung themselves upwards on