As an ex-officer and one who was lately in Egypt, you are wise to avoid in your book all reference to recent political events and the complicated situations to which they have given rise. In this letter I shall observe a similar reticence, and the more so having regard to the positions I have held in Egypt and the Sudan. Remarks on so controversial a subject must be complete and detailed if they are to assist the general public in forming a true estimate of the “tangled skein” which the political situation now represents—a situation in which truth and fiction are almost inextricably involved. The perusal of the proof sheets you have sent me, together with your excellent series of illustrations (and here may I congratulate you on the artistic skill of the charming sketches displayed in the coloured reproductions?), recall that “lure of the desert” which is so fascinating to all of us whose lot has been cast in those countries bordering on the Great Nile waterway and the illimitable stretches of sandy desert beyond. Your apt quotations at the beginning of each chapter show that the “lure” has seized you also, and I can well understand your desire to undertake further service in those regions which so evidently attract you, and in which you have won the sympathy and respect of the nomad Arab and sedentary Berber tribes of the Western Desert. The title of your book is well explained in Part I, Chapter III, and you are wise to add a bibliography of the various works you have consulted, for there is no subject more debatable than the origin of the Berber tribes of whom you write. “This crossing to Africa by the Northern Mediterranean peoples,” says Professor Breasted in his _History of Egypt_, “is but one of the many such ventures which in prehistoric ages brought over the white race whom we know as Libyans.” His remarks refer to events in the thirteenth century B.C., when people known as the Tehenu lived on the western borders of the Delta of Egypt, beyond them were the Libyans, and still further to the west were the Meshwesh or Maxyes of Herodotus—all of them doubtless ancestors of the great Berber tribes of North Africa. In the reign of the Pharaoh Mereneptah, the successor of Rameses the Great, it appears that one Meryey, King of the Libyans, forced the Tehenu to join him, and supported by roving bands of maritime adventurers from the coast (the Sherden or Sardinians, the Sikeli, natives of early Sicily, the Lysians and the Etruscans), invaded Egypt. It is with these wandering marauders that the peoples of Europe emerge for the first time upon the arena of history.