To come down was easy. Driving our heels well into the sand, we half ran, half glissaded, and soon reached the bottom. Here we were met by an old Nubian woman, who had trudged up in all haste from the nearest village to question our sailors about one Yûsef, her son, of whom she had heard nothing for nearly a year. She was a very poor old woman--a widow--and this Yûsef was her only son. Hoping to better himself he had worked his passage to Cairo in a cargo-boat some eighteen months ago. Twice since then he had sent her messages and money; but now eleven months had gone by in silence, and she feared he must be dead. Meanwhile her date-palm, taxed to the full value of its produce, had this year yielded not a piaster of profit. Her mud hut had fallen in, and there was no Yûsef to repair it. Old and sick, she now could only beg; and her neighbors, by whose charity she subsisted, were but a shade less poor than herself. Our men knew nothing of the missing Yûsef. Reïs Hassan promised when he went back to make inquiries among the boatmen of Boulak. “But then,” he added, “there are so many Yûsefs in Cairo!” It made one’s heart ache to see the tremulous eagerness with which the poor soul put her questions, and the crushed look in her face when she turned away. And now, being fortunate in respect of the wind, which for the most part blows steadily from the north between sunrise and sunset, we make good progress, and for the next ten days live pretty much on board our dahabeeyah. The main features of the landscape go on repeating themselves with but little variation from day to day. The mountains wear their habitual livery of black and gold. The river, now widening, now narrowing, flows between banks blossoming with lentils and lupins. With these, and yellow acacia-tufts, and blue castor-oil berries, and the weird coloquintida, with its downy leaf and milky juice and puff-bladder fruit, like a green peach tinged with purple, we make our daily bouquet for the dinner-table. All other flowers have vanished, and even these are hard to get in a land where every green blade is precious to the grower. Now, too, the climate becomes sensibly warmer. The heat of the sun is so great at midday that, even with the north breeze blowing, we can no longer sit on deck between twelve and three. Toward sundown, when the wind drops, it turns so sultry that to take a walk on shore comes to be regarded as a duty rather than as a pleasure. Thanks, however, to that indomitable painter who is always ready for an afternoon excursion, we do sometimes walk for an hour before dinner; striking off generally into the desert; looking for onyxes and carnelians among the pebbles that here and there strew the surface of the sand, and watching in vain for jackals and desert-hares.