accurately gauged.
We were all only too glad to carry out the written instructions we
received some days ago, to keep under cover and try to sleep from noon
to three o'clock, and if you cannot sleep yourself you must keep quiet
and allow others to sleep. No bugle calls are allowed between these
hours. All round us there has been haze through which the sun could
not penetrate, but if he had the result would have been truly
terrible. The dust has also been worse than usual and everything in my
tent is grey. This is another of the plagues of Egypt. However, if
rumour is true, we will soon depart from here for more active service.

After dark to-night we went out in search of men supposed to be
wounded, six of our bearers acting as these and starting fifteen
minutes before the stretcher bearers. The night was very dark and the
pure white ground looked absolutely even, and some narrow escapes were
made, several finding just in time that they were on the edge of a
precipice. We had planned a few signals, but the principal lesson we
were taught was that these were too few in number, and owing to this
whole stretcher squads got lost.

We are still finding and having visits from new animals. To-day I had
a dragon fly brought to me. I find I had seen several of these before
but had mistaken them for locusts. The latter have much heavier
bodies, but very similar wings. We have just had a visit from a huge
beetle which we heard battering the tent, then it gradually got
nearer, next hitting the tent pole and falling on the small table on
which my candle flickers, the glare of which had attracted him. Kellas
caught a moth and kept it for me. It was nothing much to look at, but
it is the very first I have seen here. He also describes another moth
he saw to-day as fluttering in front of a flower without alighting on
it, but hovering and thrusting its proboscis into a long-tubed flower.
I once saw a similar moth at Torphins (this had been the Humming bird
moth which I have seen hundreds of since then).

When different units get together in a camp the amount of thieving,
technically called skirmishing, is beyond belief to anyone
unaccustomed to camp life. At present we have two mules that do not
belong to us. One wandered into our camp and a man who claimed it as
belonging to his unit was told he had to prove his statement before he
would be allowed to remove it, which he failed to do. To-day another
was brought in tied to the tail-bo