At some little distance from the Nile, but what distance, whether one or ten _shoni_, Skene could not then discover, stood the zereba to which the Sheikh had lately fallen possessor after Zebehr (who had been lord of thirty exactly similar), in a strip of green, where a few palms, lupins, and beans grew in an amphitheatre of small mountains--rocky, jagged, volcanic in outline and aspect. A few camels and donkeys grazed spectral-like in the vicinity amid a silence that was intense, and in a district where there were no flights of birds as in Egypt, and no wide reaches of valley covered with green and golden plenty. Through a gorge in the steep rocky mountains, whose sides were blackened by the sun of unknown ages, and broken into fragments by some great convulsion of nature, the zereba was entered. It was a group of well-sized huts, enclosed by tall hedges, in the centre of which stood the private residence of Sheikh Moussa, having various apartments, wherein usually armed sentinels, black or swarthy, half-nude, with glowing eyes and bright weapons--swords and spears or Remington rifles--kept guard day and night. Through these, as one who was to be treated, as yet, with hospitality at least, Malcolm Skene was conducted by a couple of handsomely attired slaves (for here the power of the Anglo-Egyptian Convention was _nil_), who gave him coffee, sherbet, and a tchibouk, all most welcome after the last day's toilsome march; and, throwing himself upon a carpet and some soft skins, he strove to collect his thoughts, to calculate the distance and the perils that lay between him and freedom, and to think what was to be done now! Meanwhile the Bedouins were grooming their horses outside, laughing, chatting, smoking, and drinking long draughts of _bouza_ from stone jars--a kind of Nubian beer made from dhurra. 'People always meet again,' said Pietro Girolamo with a savage grin, showing all his sharp, white teeth beneath a long and coal-black moustache. 'The world is round, you know, Signor, though the Sheikh thinks it flat--flat as my roulette-table at Cairo. Ah, Christi! we have not forgotten that; sooner or later people always meet again, and so shall we.' And with these words, which contained a menace, the Greek withdrew to some other part of the zereba, where he seemed to be somewhat at home, as he was--Skene afterwards discovered--father of the third and favourite wife of Sheikh Moussa. The chambers, or halls--for such they were--seemed silent--save a strange growling and the rasping of iron fetters--and empty now, though there sometimes, in the palmy days of the slave trade, as many as two thousand dealers in _djellabs_ gathered with their chained and wretched victims every year. 'The regal aspect of these halls of State,' says Dr. Schweinfurth, 'was increased by the introduction of some lions, secured, as may be supposed, by sufficiently strong and massive chains.'