dition, was regarded by many of the finest minds in Egypt as too gigantic to move successfully among the unknown wastes of Ethiopia. In the first place it is taking an army into a country foul with the unhealthiest malarias, and charred to desert sands by the fiercest of African suns. The base of supplies, running along a river course, crosses deserts and winds by devious ways through hostile tribes. To move ahead is war; to send back is to meet a fire in your rear. The loss of powder, the loss of ammunition, a determined mutiny, starvation, all tend to kill an enterprise of this kind. We had intelligence, regarded as of the most authentic character, that 700 men had perished from the heat, and that Sir Samuel and his brave lady were the only white people connected with the enterprise, and they still possessed courage and hope.

In Lower Egypt the profoundest apathy prevailed concerning this and all other enterprises to unveil the African continent. Not so, however, with the Viceroy and his intelligent ministers, but with the population, which typifies barbarism veneered with civilization.

I was of the opinion that twelve energetic, I might 'say reckless, Americans, each with his special, mental

and physical gifts, could bare that whole continent to the view of an anxious mankind. Therefore when news came from Khartoum that Sir Samuel Baker was in distress at some point of the Nile basin, I prepared to go to the Soudan in order to investigate his position and condition. I soon found the journey impossible to undertake alone at that stage of the season, without incurring expenses of a character that would not justify the attempt. Happily an occasion occurred which rendered solitary traveling unnecessary. General Starring, a representative of the United States government; the Consul-General, and my old friend Gouverneur Morris, decided to undertake the perils of desert travel, and, besides, General Starring had official business along the Nile.

One morning early we drove to Boulac, the port of Cairo, on the Nile, and began the inspection of that anomalous Nile squadron called "dahabeahs.” What is a dahabeah? Simply, on its exterior, one of the most unsightly objects that ever floated upon water. Its shape comes from remote antiquity. It embodies the Mohammedan idea of marine beauty. Imagine the hull of a bluff-bowed, square-sterned North river coal barge; put up a bulk-head athwart