Two military posts ensure the policing and administration of the country: Arada, the commissariat centre of a camel-corps section, and Biltine, where a company of black troops is garrisoned. It is in the neighbourhood of Biltine that the first villages of the sedentary tribes are seen, the Mimis, then the Kodois. The millet fields, small at first and far apart, increase in size and frequency as one gets further south; but the harvests are still uncertain, for spells of drought are by no means rare. The year 1913 was especially fatal; the grain dried up on the stalk, and there was such a shortage when the crops were got in that a terrible famine spread over the whole country during the first eight months of 1914. Many inhabitants had to emigrate southwards, and those who had not foresight enough to flee in time, chiefly old men and children, died of hunger in the villages they had not been willing to leave. The number of the inhabitants of Wadai who perished thus is estimated at more than half, some say even at more than three-quarters. The population of Wadai, put by Nachtigal at more than two millions in 1872, had fallen to 300,000 when I went that way. _Abéché._—At sunrise on 31 May 1917 I came in sight of Abéché, the famous capital of the sultans who had made of Wadai one of the most powerful Soudanese kingdoms of the nineteenth century. Seen from a distance, it looks like a little cluster, grey and huddled, of low houses, overtopped by a few towers with pointed roofs, and had nothing of the handsome appearance that had impressed Nachtigal nearly fifty years before. It was now no more than a small town of three or four thousand people, and more than half ruined. It is true that ruins are accumulated with extreme rapidity in Central Africa, where the finest houses are only ill-built huts of clay kneaded and baked in the sun, and quickly falling into dilapidation every rainy season. The plain surrounding the town looks no better, being scantily covered with dry grasses and little green clumps of “m’keit” which our camels browsed on with lively satisfaction. The shrub-tribe was almost exclusively represented by little “oshar,” whose puffy-looking fruits enclose a silky down like “kapok”; as for the mimosa family, so abundant in the neighbouring bush, it had well-nigh disappeared, as often happens near the negro habitations through the wasteful use made of it as firewood.