TREES OF DELIVERANCE.

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by two kilometers. Those two green tufts rising on the horizon above the sea of sand affected me like the first sight of a promised land. We felt inclined to cry, 'Land! Land!'

As soon as we reached these trees of deliverance, we took some indispensable rest in their shade. Our asses and ourselves were in a deplorable condition. Our baggage camels, being indefatigable animals, and above such merely human weaknesses, had gone straight on to Tamyèh, where we expected to rejoin them, and to find our tents pitched and ready for us.

We had still a large tract of the Desert to traverse, and it was not easy to get into harness again, after tearing ourselves from our brief slumber. The aspect of the ground was changed; we could perceive the tracks of men and camels, we were approaching soil more solid, less mutable than the sands in which we had narrowly escaped burial. By the firmer tread of our animals we felt that we were passing over rocks, now covered, but which we should soon behold under a far different aspect. After having climbed some rugged and irregular steeps, we suddenly found ourselves on the brink of an immense ravine, a veritable precipice, more than a hundred yards in width. This natural canal stretches from above Tamyèh to lake

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Birket-Keroun; and serves, with others, to supply the waters of the Nile, which completely fill it during the inundations.

When we reached its brink, it was dry, and it presented the wildest and most frightful aspect possible to conceive. By a strange caprice of nature, its great rocks looked like the remains of an immense city precipitated into the abyss. Grasses and shrubs of all kinds bound these rocks together, and made a natural den of them for the most ferocious beasts one could imagine. We found we were not wrong, and that this Egyptian savannah deserves its reputation only too well. Hordes of wild boars have installed a republic there, highly disastrous to the dwellers in the vicinity. The destruction they cause among the crops is a real calamity to the country, which can hardly sustain itself, being literally surrounded by desert. Old sporting reminiscences rendered this spot very interesting to our chief, who had not come there for the first time, and who executed, on the following day, the finest shooting scene the dwellers in Tamyèh had ever seen in a picture.

We arrived, and had to effect a provisional installation. The village, which is tolerably large, stretched before us on the other side of this immense ravine.

It was by no means easy to cross it; but we did it somehow, and two hours afterwards, we were under our tents, pitched towards the north-east, in front of the principal gate. This wide oasis is a charming landscape, framed in a broad golden line, which bounds it on every side. It is an island of verdure in a vast expanse of sand. From our high-perched camp, we commanded the minutest details of the village. Facing us was the principal gate, a kind of arcade, composed alternately of dry and burned bricks. This is the meeting-ground of all the arrivals, the great market where all the most important personages of the locality assemble. On the right a pretty minaret springs into the air, like the tower of a village church, and several tufts of palm-trees break the monotony of the roofs and terraces of the houses. Animals of all kinds, as well as the inhabitants, walk about on the roofs, and nothing can exceed the oddity of the spectacle, regarded on a large scale. Here are women, spreading out linen to dry, Arabs rebuilding a dilapidated roof, children running about, and jumping from house to house like our liveliest gutter-cats. In all this comical animation the feature which struck us most was the incredible number of dogs : never had we seen so many, or such a variety. Not a terrace but