I must not forget to add that among this motley crowd we saw two brothers, natives of Khartûm. We met them first in the town, and afterward in the camp. They wore voluminous white turbans and flowing robes of some kind of creamy cashmere cloth. Their small proud heads and delicate aristocratic features were modeled on the purest Florentine type; their eyes were long and liquid; their complexions, free from any taint of Abyssinian blue or Nubian bronze, were intensely, lustrously, magnificently black. We agreed that we had never seen two such handsome men. They were like young and beautiful Dantes carved in ebony; Dantes unembittered by the world, unsicklied by the pale cast of thought, and glowing with the life of the warm south. Having explored Elephantine and ransacked the bazaars, our party dispersed in various directions. Some gave the remainder of the day to letter-writing. The painter, bent on sketching, started off in search of a jackal-haunted ruin up a wild ravine on the Libyan side of the river. The writer and the idle man boldly mounted camels and rode out into the Arabian desert. Now the camel-riding that is done at Assûan is of the most commonplace description, and bears to genuine desert traveling about the same relation that half an hour on the Mer de Glace bears to the passage of the Mortaretsch glacier or the ascent of Monte Rosa. The short cut from Assûan to Philæ, or at least the ride to the granite quarries, forms part of every dragoman’s programme, and figures as the crowning achievement of every Cook’s tourist. The Arabs themselves perform these little journeys much more pleasantly and expeditiously on donkeys. They take good care, in fact, never to scale the summit of a camel if they can help it. But for the impressionable traveler, the Assûan camel is _de rigueur_. In his interests are those snarling quadrupeds, betasseled and berugged, taken from their regular work, and paraded up and down the landing-place. To transport cargoes disembarked above and below the cataract is their vocation. Taken from this honest calling to perform in an absurd little drama got up especially for the entertainment of tourists, it is no wonder if the beasts are more than commonly ill-tempered. They know the whole proceeding to be essentially cockney, and they resent it accordingly. The ride, nevertheless, has its advantages; not the least being that it enables one to realize the kind of work involved in any of the regular desert expeditions. At all events, it entitles one to claim acquaintance with the ship of the desert, and (bearing in mind the probable inferiority of the specimen) to form an _ex pede_ judgment of his qualification.