We rested our camels and our men at Hadai, and drank of some fresh water from a little pool, the first we had seen in this barren country, which was supplied by a tiny stream that made its appearance for a few yards in a sheltered corner of the valley, a stream of priceless value in this thirsty land. Debalohp suggested to my husband that he knew of some ruins in a neighbouring valley to which he could take him, but it was not without considerable hesitation that he decided to go. A long day's ride in this hot country, supposed to be almost, if not quite, within the Dervish sphere of influence, was not lightly to be undertaken, more especially as he had been on so many fruitless errands in search of ruins at suggestions of the Bedouin, and returned disgusted, and when he mounted his camel next morning, without any hope of finding anything, and sure of a fatiguing day, had a reasonable excuse offered itself, he would probably not have gone. But the unexpected in these cases is always happening. The long ride turned out only to be one of three hours. Wadi Gabeit was somewhat more fertile and picturesque than any we had as yet seen, and as a climax to it all came the discovery of an ancient gold-mine, worked in ages long gone by doubtless by that mysterious race whose tombs and buildings we had been speculating upon. Diodorus, in his account of an old Egyptian gold-mine, describes most accurately what my husband found in the Wadi Gabeit. For miles along it at the narrower end were the ruins of miners' huts; both up the main valley and up all the collateral ones there must have been seven or eight hundred of them at the lowest computation. Then there were hundreds of massive crushing-stones, neatly constructed out of blocks of basalt, which had been used for breaking the quartz, lying in wild confusion amongst the ruined huts, and by the side of what once was a stream, but is now only a sandy, choked-up river-bed. On a high rock in the middle of the valley he found a trifle of a Greek inscription scratched by a miner, who had evidently been working the rich quartz vein just below it. On an eminence behind the valley was another of the circular forts in ruins, similar to the one on the hill above Wadi Hadai, intended evidently for a look-out post to protect the miners at work below. Burnt quartz and refuse of quartz lay around in all directions, and on either side of the valley, stretched for a mile or more, were seams of the auriferous quartz just as it had been laid bare by the ancient workers. There was no question for a moment that he had come across the centre of a great mining industry, lost in these desert valleys behind the mighty wall by which Mount Erba and its spurs shuts off this district from the Red Sea littoral.