After all the Suakim-Berber road, that was looked upon as full of dramatic incident--for even our military friends in Berber, when they bid us goodby, said, "It was a very sporting thing to do. Great Scott! They only wished they had the luck to come along"--was a highway without even a highwayman upon it, and apparently for the moment as pleasantly safe, minus the hostelries en route, as the road from London to York. Prom the top of Tamai Pass, 2,870 feet--though of the same name, not to be confounded with the famous battle which took place further south--we began to make a rapid descent, and the last sixty miles of our journey were spent in traversing some of the most lovely mountain scenery I think I have ever visited. Sometimes one might be passing over a Yorkshire moorland, with its purple backing of hills, for the sky was lowering and threatened rain. Then the scene would as quickly change to a Swiss valley, when, on rounding the base of a spur, one would strike a weird, volcanic-torn country whose mountains piled up in utter confusion like the waves of the stormy Atlantic; and further on we would come out upon a plain once more scattered with gigantic bowlders of porphyry and trap, out of which the monoliths of ancient Thebes might have been fashioned. On the morning of the tenth day out from Berber, we sighted the fort and signal tower of the Egyptian post at Tambuk, on a lofty rugged rock, standing out in the middle of an immense khor. This was practically the beginning of the end of our long journey, and here we rested a few hours, once more drinking our fill of pure sparkling water from its revetted wells. About half an hour in a northeasterly direction, after a continual descent from the Egyptian fort, we noticed, at intervals between the hills in front of us, a straight band of blue which sparkled in the sunlight. At this sight I could not refrain from giving a cheer--it was the Red Sea that glistened with the sun--for it meant so much to us. Across its shining bosom was our path to civilization and its attendant comforts, which we had been denied for many a month. Night found us steadily descending to ward the seaboard, as we neared Otao, in the vicinity of which we were to bivouac for the night. My camel nearly stumbled over an old rusty rail thrown across my path, and further on I could trace in the moonlight the dark trail of a crazy permanent way, with its rails all askew.