on two superb maherhies, and proceeding at the rate of about six miles an hour.  A bag of zumeeta (some parched corn), and one or two skins for water, with a small brass basin, and a wooden bowl, out of which they ate and drank, were all their comforts.  A little meat, cut in strips, and dried in the sun, called gedeed, is sometimes added to the store, which they eat raw; for they rarely light a fire for the purpose of cooking; although the want of this comfort during the nights, on approaching Fezzan, where the cold winds are sometimes biting after the day’s heat, is often fatal to such travellers.  A bag is suspended under the tail of the maherhy, by which means the dung is preserved, and this serves as fuel on halting in the night.  Without a kafila, and a sufficient number of camels to carry such indispensables as wood and water, it is indeed a perilous journey.

On the 27th, they appeared gradually to approach something resembling vegetation.  They had rising lands and clumps of fine grass the whole of the way, and the country was not unlike some of the heaths in England.  A herd of more than a hundred gazelles crossed them towards the evening, and the footmarks of the ostrich, and some of its feathers, were discovered by the Arabs.  The spot where they halted was called Geogo Balwy.

Early on the following morning, they made Beere-Kashifery, and soon afterwards Mina Tahr, (the black bird,) the sheik of the Gunda Tibboos, attended by three of his followers, approached the camp.  Beere-Kashifery lay within his territories, and no kafilas pass without paying tribute, which, as he is absolute, sometimes amounts to half what they possess.  In the present case, the visit was one of respect.  Boo Khaloom received him in his tent, and clothed him in a scarlet bornouse of coarse cloth, and a tawdry silk caftan, which was considered as a superb present.  The Tibboos are smart active fellows, mounted on small horses of great swiftness; their saddles are of wood, small and light, open along the bone of the back; the pieces of wood, of which they are composed, are lashed together with thongs of hide; the stuffing is camels’ hair, wound and plaited so as to be a perfect guard; the girths and stirrup-leathers are also of plaited thongs, and the stirrups themselves of iron, very small and light; into these, four toes only are thrust, the great toe being left to take its chance.  They mount quickly, in half the time an Arab does, by the assistance of a spear, which they place in the ground, at the same time the left foot is planted in the stirrup, and thus they spring into the saddle.

Their camels had not finished drinking until the sun was full six fathoms high, as the Arabs term it; and as the expedition was in want of fresh meat, and indeed of every thing, Mina Tahr proposed that they should go to a well nearer his people, which, he assured them, was never yet shown to an Arab.