My old acquaintance, M. Lafargue, who was settled in Berber as a merchant and presided over the French Vice-consulate, himself an experienced traveller on the Upper Nile, received me with that hearty hospitality which many other desert wanderers have proved besides myself. Sir Samuel Baker aptly compares such receptions to the oasis in the desert. No necessity of letters of introduction here as with us in Europe; no hollow forms of speech, exchanging courtesies which perchance mean the very reverse; no empty compliment of at best a tedious dinner; but here in Egypt the people receive us with free and genial amiability, all Europeans are fellow citizens and everything is true and hearty. “What pleases me the most is the ease with which you travel in this country; you come, you go, you return again, as though it were a walk.” Such were M. Lafargue’s cordial words to me. We parted well pleased with one another: I shall not see him again. About the last part of the journey to Khartoom, which embraces the passage up the Nile, and which is sufficiently well known by the descriptions of other travellers, I have nothing new to relate. By the complete failure of wind, much of this portion of my journey was so exceptionally prolonged, that it took sixteen days to accomplish the whole. For the first part of the voyage, as far as Shendy and Matamma, the only considerable towns in this district, the shore offered nothing attractive. It reminded me of the Egyptian valley of the Nile only in two places; the mouth of the Atbara, and one spot where the renowned pyramids of Meroe formed a noble background. Matamma is a populous town, but extremely slow and dull. The buildings, constructed of Nile earth, are insignificant in themselves, and irregularly crowded together in a mass like huge ant-hills; not a single tree affords its shade to the dreary streets, which are filthy with dirt. The _ennui_ and the calm which obliged us to lay to here, suggested all sorts of unprofitable vagaries to my servant Arbab. He received from me part of his wages, and took a wife on the spot from amongst the circle of his kinsfolk. The bride, two days afterwards, was given back to herself and her relations, to await indefinitely, for a year and a day, the expected return of her husband. Arbab had already been several times married in Khartoom; and at every return he repeated the same usual, one may almost say, the becoming custom.