reabouts into
the Red Sea, in the vicinity of the Island of the Serpent
King, but I hold, with Mariette, that the Puanit where the
Egyptians of Hatshopsitu's time landed is the present
Somali-land--a view which is also shared by Navillo, but
which Brugsch, in the latter years of his life, abandoned.

[Illustration: 361.jpg AN INHABITANT OF THE LAND OF PUANIT]

Drawn by Fauchon-Gudin, from a photograph by Gayet.

The first stations which the latter encountered beyond Cape
Direh--Avails, Malao, Mundos, and Mosylon--were merely open roadsteads
offering no secure shelter; but beyond Mosylon, the classical navigators
reported the existence of several wadys, the last of which, the Elephant
River, lying between Bas el-Eil and Cape Guardafui, appears to have been
large enough not only to afford anchorage to several vessels of light
draught, but to permit of their performing easily any evolutions
required. During the Roman period, it was there, and there only, that
the best kind of incense could be obtained, and it was probably at this
point also that the Egyptians of Hatshopsitu's time landed. The Egyptian
vessels sailed up the river till they reached a place beyond the
influence of the tide, and then dropped anchor in front of a village
scattered along a bank fringed with sycomores and palms.*

* I have shown, from a careful examination of the bas-
reliefs, that the Egyptians must have landed, not on the
coast itself, as was at first believed, but in the estuary
of a river, and this observation has been accepted as
decisive by most Egyptologists; besides this, newly
discovered fragments show the presence of a hippopotamus.
Since then I have sought to identify the landing-place of
the Egyptians with the most important of the creeks
mentioned by the Graeco-Roman merchants as accessible for
their vessels, viz. that which they called the Elephant
River, near to the present Ras el-Fil.

The huts of the inhabitants were of circular shape, each being
surmounted with a conical roof; some of them were made of closely
plaited osiers, and there was no opening in any of them save the door.
They were built upon piles, as a protection from the rise of the
river and from wild animals, and access to them was gained by means of
moveable ladders. Oxen chewing the cud rested beneath them. The natives
belonged to a light-coloured race, and the portraits we