arly suffocated by a whirlwind that
buried everything in the tents several inches in dust.

The heat was intense; the night, however, was cool and pleasant. About
half-past eight, as Mr Baker lay asleep, he fancied that he heard a
rumbling like distant thunder. The low uninterrupted roll increasing in
volume, presently a confusion of voices arose from the Arabs' camp, his
men shouting as they rushed through the darkness: "The river! the
river!"

Mahomet exclaimed that the river was coming down, and that the supposed
distant roar was the approach of water. Many of the people, who had
been sleeping on the clean sand of the river's bed, were quickly
awakened by the Arabs, who rushed down the steep bank to save the skulls
of two hippopotami which were exposed to dry.

The sound of the torrent, as it rushed by amid the darkness, and the
men, dripping with wet, dragging their heavy burdens up the bank, told
that the great event had occurred. The river had arrived like a thief
in the night.

The next morning, instead of the barren sheet of clear white sand with a
fringe of withered bush and trees upon its borders, cutting the yellow
expanse of desert, a magnificent stream, the noble Atbara river flowed
by, some five hundred yards in width, and from fifteen to twenty feet in
depth. Not a drop of rain, however, had fallen; but the current gave
the traveller a clue to one portion of the Nile mystery. The rains were
pouring down in Abyssinia--these were the sources of the Nile.

The rainy season, however, at length began, during which it was
impossible to travel.

The Arabs during that period migrate to the drier regions in the north.

On their way they arrived in the neighbourhood of the camp of the great
Sheikh Achmet Abou Sinn, to whom Mr Baker had a letter of introduction.
Having sent it forward by Mahomet, in a short time the sheikh appeared,
attended by several of his principal people. He was mounted on a
beautiful snow-white _hygeen_, his appearance being remarkably dignified
and venerable. Although upwards of eighty years old, he was as erect as
a lance, and of herculean stature; a remarkably arched nose, eyes like
an eagle's, beneath large, shaggy, but perfectly white eyebrows, while a
snow-white beard of great thickness descended below the middle of his
breast. He wore a large white turban, and a white cashmere robe
reaching from the throat to the ankles. He was indeed the perfect
picture of a desert pa