We must now change the scene to the Soudan--_Beled-es-Soudan_, or 'The Land of the Blacks,' so called by ancient geographers--whither a single flight of imagination will take us without undergoing a fortnight's voyage by sea to Alexandria, _viâ_ the Bay of Biscay, with its long, heavy swells, and the Mediterranean, which is not always like a mill pond; and then a long and toilsome route across the Lower and Upper Provinces to where the Sheikh Moussa Abu Hagil was journeying towards his remote home, with the luckless Malcolm Skene in his train--a place on the borders of the Nubian Desert, not far from the Nile, in the neighbourhood of the third cataract, and situated about midway between Assouan, the name of which had not, as yet, become a 'household word' with us, and Khartoum, where then the well-nigh despairing Gordon was still waging his desperate defence against the Mahdi. By this time how weary had the eye--yea, the very soul--of the luckless captive become of the desert scenery, in a land visited only by a few bold travellers, who in times past had accompanied the caravans from one valley to another. There the desert sand is deep and loose, with sharp flinty stones, in some places sprinkled with glistening rock salt, and showing here and there a grove of dwindled acacias or tufts of colocynth and senna, to relieve the awful dreariness of its aspect. The water in the pools, even in the rainy season, is there black and putrid; hence the Arabs of the district remove with their flocks to better regions, where the higher mountains run from Assouan to Haimaur. Steering, as it were, unerringly by landmarks known to themselves alone, the Sheikh Moussa Abu Hazil and his followers made progress towards his home--or zereba--in the quarter we have mentioned. Malcolm Skene had now been conveyed so far inland by his captors that escape seemed hopeless; yet, buoyed up by the secret chance that such _might_ come, he struggled on with the party day by day, ignorant of the fate that awaited him, though he could never forget that of Palmer and his companions on the shore of the Red Sea. More than once Hassan Abdullah mockingly held before him the pocket compass, which, of course, he had contrived to abstract on some occasion. Its loss did not matter much now, but it was eventually appropriated by the Sheikh Moussa, whether it were _efrit_ or not; and Hassan, who seemed inclined to resent this, received in reward a blow from their leader's lance.