The army reached Sennaar in thirteen days.  The signal for striking the tents and loading the camels was generally fired about two hours after midnight.  One hour was allowed for loading the baggage, when a second cannon was fired, and the march of the army commenced, and was continued each day till about two or three hours before noon, when the camp reposed till about two hours after midnight of the same day.  The army suffered severely during this march; nothing was given to the troops for subsistence but durra, unground, which the soldiers were frequently in great distress to obtain the means of making into meal, in order to bake a little miserable bread, which was all they had to eat.[49] For myself, I was reduced to great extremity.  The camel, carrying my provisions and culinary utensils, and several other articles, was lost by the carelessness of a domestic.  I was consequently left without any thing to eat, or the means of preparing what I might obtain.  I threw myself under the hospitable shade of the tent of Mr. Caillaud, (then only occupied by Mr. Constant, his companion,) the gentleman I have mentioned in the Preface with so much well merited esteem, where I stayed till my arrival at Sennaar.

The country we traversed is that part of the kingdom of Sennaar which lies between the Nile and the Bahar el Abiud.  It is an immense and fertile plain, occupied by numerous villages, some of them very large; that of “Wahat Medinet,” for instance, containing, probably, four or five thousand inhabitants.  What country we saw was, at this season, perfectly naked of grass, consisting generally of immense fields which, in the season past, had been planted with durra.  Acacia trees, and bushes in the country far back from the river, (which is sandy,) were abundant, but no herbage was visible; I did not see throughout our route a single waterwheel;[50] and I believe that the country is only cultivated when the inundation has retired.

The houses of the villages are built in the following manner.  A circle of stakes is planted in the ground, a conical frame of poles attached to these stakes below, and meeting and fastened at the top of the cone, forms the roof.  This roof, and the sides of the house, are then covered with thatched straw, which suffices to exclude the rains.

Some of the houses, however, belonging to the chiefs are of a stronger fabric, being composed of thick walls made of bricks dried in the sun, and having terraced roofs.  In the thatched cottages I have mentioned, the air and light come in by the doorway and four small holes pierced in the walls of the house.  This scanty ventilation renders these cottages very hot and close:  the difference between the temperature of an inhabited house and that of the air outside being, in my judgment, almost as great as that of the undressing room of a bath at Cairo, and that of the passage just outside of the bath itself.  This circumstance alone is almost sufficient to account for the great mortality in Sennaar, during the rainy season, when whole families are shut up in these close cottages; and every one who goes abroad must necessarily go with his pores in a condition expressly adapted to make him catch a cold or a fever.