"At sunset we had to seek a halting-place, and this was offered to us by the Djaalin Arabs, who placed two very comfortable tents at our disposal. Just as, after a somewhat light supper, we were going to retire to our sleeping apartments, a peculiar odour, for which none of us could account, suddenly reached our olfactory organs. Our interpreter, Ali, who had accompanied us, was despatched for information, and without any loss of time he edified us by a description of a very curious custom. The women of this country, in order To render themselves as pleasing as possible to their husbands, and to replace those charms of which time may have robbed them, have conceived the idea of attraction by means of perfumes, with which they impregnate themselves to such an extent that the odour appears natural to them. To arrive at this result, they dig a ditch, fill it with live charcoal, throw in fragrant plants and sweet-smelling wood, and, then, covered from head to foot in a huge sheet, they seat themselves over the ditch, and thus take an aromatic bath. Their husbands, deeply sensible of this delicate attention, forget in the power of their perfume, their weakness in the matter of beauty. "'I suppose,' remarked Périères, 'that in this country a man would never say that his better half was pretty. He would dilate his nostrils, take a voluptuous sniff and exclaim, 'How nice my wife does smell!' "This morning we went once more on board our vessel, which had kept moving all night, and awaited us at Chendi. This place recalls many an ancient glory; it was, they say, the famous island of Meröe of old, a powerful state of which even Thebes was a tributary. All this splendour belongs to the past, but Chendi, anxious still to be talked about, has for a long time been a slave depôt. "Our vessel now lands us on the other side of the stream, the left bank, at a place far less ancient, in which the houses are crowded together without any regularity or design, very much like ant hills, but thickly inhabited and often visited by slave and ivory merchants; it is called Matamma. Still under the charm of our last evening's excursion, we not only make an inspection of the town on horseback, but we venture as far as the edge of the famous desert of Bahiouda, of which, up to the present time, we had only seen the undulations from the deck of our vessel. This excursion led to an adventure, a very dramatic incident, which made a great impression upon me, and will, I feel sure, have a similar effect upon you." CHAPTER XXXVIII. "What induced us, I wonder, to venture thus into the open desert? Instead of galloping straight ahead it would have been more according to reason to follow the banks of the Nile and continue on our way towards Khartoum.