In his tent, he was roused from an uneasy dream that he was again lying at the bottom of the Kelpie's Cleugh at Earlshaugh, by an orderly sergeant, who brought him this welcome command about dawn, and noon saw him, with a small flotilla of boats freighted with pain and suffering, take his leave of the South Staffordshire and begin his journey down the Nile, _viâ_ New Dongola, the cataracts at Ambigol and elsewhere, by Wady-Halfa and other points where temporary hospitals or halting-places were established. Day by day the boats with their melancholy loads, sometimes by oars, at others with canvas set, had dropped down the Nile between barren shores overlooked by wild and sterile mountains, where the sick were almost stunned occasionally by the harsh yells of the watchful Arabs echoing from rocks and caves! and, after turning a sharp angle, Roland suddenly saw the island of Phite, with all its numerous temples, before his flotilla, and as there was a considerable flood in the river the cataract there became a source of anxiety to him, and rather abated the interest with which he might otherwise have surveyed the scene around him. 'Shellal! Shellal!' (the Cataract! the Cataract!) he heard the yells of the naked Arabs, who hovered on the banks expecting a catastrophe, which they would have beheld with savage joy. The soldiers held their breath and hung on their suspended oars, the blades of which dripped and flashed like gold in the sheen of the setting sun; yet the boats glided down the foaming rapid without a sound other than the rush of the water; then came a sudden calm, an amazing combination of light and colour on shore, and isle, and stream, with the rays of the moon, in the blue zenith, conflicting with those of the sun at the horizon. 'On either side,' wrote one who was there, 'walls of overhanging rock shut in the river, standing in pious guardianship around the sacred isle. Beneath their frowning blackness lapped and flowed a shining expanse of water stained with crimson in the sunset's glow, in which a line of tall and plumy palms were bending in the wind; to the east, the Libyan sands poured in a golden stream through every cleft and fissure in the darkling hills; and overhead, and all about, floated a splendour of reddening fire. From their station they seemed to look straight into the very heart of the sunset when all the west had burst into sudden flames of fire. The freshening wind tossed them in uncertain rise and fall; the melancholy sound of the distant cataract, and now and then the cry of some night bird cut sharply through the stillness of the hour. An immense sense of loneliness brooded over the empty temples and adjacent isles abandoned by their forgotten gods, whose sculptured faces gazed mournfully out from the crumbling walls, then flushed with the supreme splendour of the dying day.