On January 25, at one in the morning, we left Wady Halfa on the homeward voyage. Ahmud requested us to permit him to bring a slave on the boat. He told us that he had no children, and that he had seen a very fine little boy of nine years whom he could purchase for seventy dollars. His request was refused. We spent an hour or more one beautiful moonlight night seated on the sand beneath the colossi of Aboo-Simbel. We engaged a celebrated hunter to assist us in crocodile-hunting—Abd-el-Kerim, slave of the god, a Nubian with a huge flat nose. The dress of this man of prowess was not elaborate, consisting of a skull-cap and a pair of drawers. He carried the flint-lock musket which I have before described. The lock was carefully bound up in a piece of cloth. We moored the dahabeeáh on the west bank about four miles below Aboo-Simbel. We then rowed about a mile up the river in the small boat, and landed on a sand-bank. Abd-el-Kerim constructed a crocodile of sand—head, tail, legs, and all. We had laid a systematic plan of attack. At sunrise the next morning we were to conceal ourselves behind the sand timsah and wait the coming of the natural ones, thinking that they would take our sand-constructed reptile for one of the family, and go quietly asleep alongside of it. I rose before the sun the next morning, but Kerim did not make his appearance until eight o’clock—he called it sunrise—when the sun was pretty well up in the heavens, and the day began to grow warm. As I stood on the forecastle waiting for him, two Polish dahabeeáhs hove in sight. I knew the party on board; they were distinguished naturalists who were collecting specimens for the museum at Warsaw. They hunted in the most thoroughly systematic manner. The young count, who was not as deeply engaged in the study of natural history as the others, spent an evening with us a week or two afterward, and told us a very amusing story about the rest of the party. They were anxious to secure a certain species of bird. After consulting their books and putting together the general knowledge they possessed concerning the habits of this bird, they established as a positive fact that the said bird would appear on the banks of the Nile at ten o’clock to perform his morning ablutions. So at half-past nine they went out to meet him, but, to their intense astonishment, he did not appear until half-past eleven—overslept himself, no doubt, not being aware of the distinguished company awaiting him. They have been in a great state of excitement ever since, said our young friend, endeavoring to study out the cause of this strange proceeding, as they termed it, of the bird being one hour and a half behind time. As I watched the boats came on, and our sand timsah caught the eye of their dragoman. He rushed down-stairs, woke up the howadjii, who soon appeared on deck. Telescopes were levelled, and, having satisfied themselves that it was a crocodile, they jumped into the small boat and made straight for it.