SKETCH VI.

THE DESERT.

A Sand-strewn Breakfast-Tamyèh-The Conservatoire of Dogs-A Wild Boar Hunt with a Knife.

AFTER having successively followed and crossed a long series of canals and ponds, we reached the confines of the cultivated land, and began to tread the sands of the Desert. This was to be a hard day's work, for we were to make only one stage of it to the village of Tamyèh, which is in the centre of the province of Fayoum. The day was, in fact, a hard one, notwithstanding the precautions we had taken, because we had not counted upon a hurricane of sand which surprised us in the midst of the Desert, just at the always interesting moment of dinner.

It must have been mid-day at the Bourse, but it was at least four o'clock by our stomachs. We had unpacked our ordinary flat dishes and plates, with all the eatables which were to figure upon them, and our eyes were already devouring the papers in which all these cold viands were wrapped up. We were just

A SAND STORM.

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taking hold of our forks, when, quicker than lightning, an immense sheet of sand fell upon us, the sand-hill against which we were seated was dispersed by the tempest, and rushed like a cascade over everything, ourselves and our breakfast included. Waves of sand, lifted from the earth, struck us in the face, and blinded us. The bottles, the plates and dishes, the eatables, were all buried in sand, and we had to dig vigorously to prevent our furniture and ourselves from disappearing in the cataclysm. The Arabs, after giving us a little help in our distress, lay down in the sand, thus avoiding the painful contact of the wind, which struck us in the face, like blows from a whip. The temperature had suddenly changed: icy cold had replaced the heat which we had been feeling since the morning; and, like the currents of hot and cold water in the sea or in rivers, this layer of cold air seemed to fall from some celestial glacier. Our wretched asses suffered horribly; notwithstanding their strong instinct of self-preservation, and the devoted exertions of the Arabs, the unfortunate animals were seized with actual convulsions, and they struggled and rolled about in frantic efforts to escape from the invading sand. The blood streamed from their eyes and nostrils, and in the midst of the

G

uproar, we thought of the army of King Cambyses, which, surprised, like us, in the desert, did not bring back so much as a single chassepot.

Even our dragoman acknowledged that this was a terrible day, and one of the hardest of our expedition. The matter in hand was to get away. This was laborious enough, for, after we had found the greater part of our accessories, we had to set to work to extract our asses from the sand, and to bring them on. We muffled our faces in veils and kouffies, but the sand got through everything; our eyes were full of it, and the violence with which it came against our skin almost flayed us alive. At the expiration of two hours the storm abated, happily for the success of our journey, and we passed on to another experience.

In an opposite direction to that in which we were journeying, the mirage showed us endless rows of palm-trees; our critical situation, this treacherous apparition, and the inverse route which we were pursuing, contributed to render us apprehensive about what the result of our day might be. At length, the Arabs, whose eyes are accustomed to the desert and its snares, pointed out some real palm-trees. But I could not see them until we had advanced nearer to them

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!'

Our

As soon as we reached these trees of deliverance, we took some indispensable rest in their shade. 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

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.