mprudently ventured into some thorny
thicket to attack a village perched on a rocky summit, would experience
a reverse, and would with great difficulty regain the main body of
troops, after having lost three-fourths of its men. In most cases there
was no prolonged resistance, and the attacking party carried the place
with the loss of merely two or three men killed or wounded. The spoil
was never very considerable in any one locality, but its total amount
increased as the raid was carried afield, and it soon became so bulky
that the party had to stop and retrace their steps, in order to place
it for safety in the nearest fortress. The booty consisted for the most
part of herds of oxen and of cumbrous heaps of grain, as well as wood
for building purposes. But it also comprised objects of small size but
of great value, such as ivory, precious stones, and particularly gold.
The natives collected the latter in the alluvial tracts watered by the
Tacazze, the Blue Nile and its tributaries. The women were employed
in searching for nuggets, which were often of considerable size; they
enclosed them in little leather cases, and offered them to the merchants
in exchange for products of Egyptian industry, or they handed them over
to the goldsmiths to be made into bracelets, ear, nose, or finger rings,
of fairly fine workmanship. Gold was found in combination with several
other metals, from which they did not know how to separate it: the
purest gold had a pale yellow tint, which was valued above all others,
but electrum, that is to say, gold alloyed with silver in the proportion
of eighty per cent., was also much in demand, while greyish-coloured
gold, mixed with platinum, served for making common jewellery.*

* Cailliaud has briefly described the auriferous sand of the
Qamamyl, and the way in which it is worked: it is from him
that I have borrowed the details given in the text. From
analyses which I caused to be made at the Bulaq Museum of
Egyptian jewellery of the time of the XVIIIth dynasty, which
had been broken and were without value, from an archeo-
logical or artistic point of view, I have demonstrated the
presence of the platinum and silver mentioned by Cailliaud
as being found in the nuggets from the Blue Nile.

None of these expeditions produced any lasting results, and the Pharaohs
established no colonies in any of these countries. Their Egyptian
subjects could not have lived t