“Sittèh!” said he, “call sittèh! Crocodilo!” We examined the object through our glasses. We laughed the pilot to scorn. It was the worst imitation of a crocodile that we had yet seen. All at once the palm-trunk lifted up its head, cocked its tail, found its legs, set off running, wriggling, undulating down the slope with incredible rapidity and was gone before we could utter an exclamation. We three had a bad time when the other two came up and found that we had seen our first crocodile without them. A sand-bank which we passed next morning was scored all over with fresh trails and looked as if it had been the scene of a crocodile-parliament. There must have been at least twenty or thirty members present at the sitting; and the freshness of the marks showed that they had only just dispersed. A keen and cutting wind carried us along the last thirty miles of our journey. We had supposed that the farther south we penetrated the hotter we should find the climate; yet now, strange to say, we were shivering in sealskins, under the most brilliant sky in the world and in a latitude more southerly than that of Mecca or Calcutta. It was some compensation, however, to run at full speed past the dullest of Nile scenery, seeing only sand-banks in the river; sand-hills and sand-flats on either hand; a disused shâdûf or a skeleton-boat rotting at the water’s edge; a wind-tormented Dôm palm struggling for existence on the brink of the bank. At a fatal corner about six miles below Wady Halfeh, we passed a melancholy flotilla of dismantled dahabeeyahs--the Fostât, the Zenobia, the Alice, the Mansoorah--all alike weather-bound and laid up helplessly against the wind. The Mansoorah, with Captain and Mrs. E---- on board, had been three days doing these six miles; at which rate of progress they might reasonably hope to reach Cairo in about a year and a month. The palms of Wady Halfeh, blue with distance, came into sight at the next bend; and by noon the Philæ was once more moored alongside the Bagstones under a shore crowded with cangias, covered with bales and packing-cases and, like the shores of Mahatta and Assûan, populous with temporary huts. For here it is that traders going by water embark and disembark on their way to and fro between Dongola and the first cataract. There were three temples--or at all events three ancient Egyptian buildings--once upon a time on the western bank over against Wady Halfeh. Now there are a few broken pillars, a solitary fragment of brick pylon, some remains of a flight of stone steps leading down to the river, and a wall of inclosure overgrown with wild pumpkins. These ruins, together with a rambling native Khan and a noble old sycamore, form a picturesque group backed by amber sand-cliffs, and mark the site of a lost city[124] belonging to the early days of Usurtesen III.