The tall masts of the schooner of war, raking above the belt of dwarf jungle that skirts the tortuous coast, served as a beacon to the new camp, the distance of which from the town of Tajura was less than four miles. A narrow footpath wound along the burning sands, across numerous water-courses from the impending mountain range of trachyte and porphyry, whose wooded base, thickly clothed with mimosa and _euphorbia antiquorum_, harboured swine, pigmy antelope, and guinea-fowl in abundance. Many large trees, uprooted by the wintry torrent, had been swept far out to sea, where in derision of the waves that buffet their dilapidated, stag-horn looking arms, they will long ride safely at anchor. The pelican of the wilderness soiled through the tossing surf, and files of Bedouin damsels, in greasy leathern petticoats, bending beneath a load of fuel from the adjacent hamlets, traversed the sultry strand; whilst a long train of wretched children, with streaming elf-like locks, who had been kidnapped in the unexplored interior, wended their weary way with a slave caravan, towards the sea-port, whence they were to be sold into foreign bondage. An avenue through the trees presently revealed the white tent, occupying a sequestered nook on the course of a mountain stream near its junction with the shore. Here horses and mules were doing their utmost, by diligently cropping the scanty tufts of sun-burnt grass, to repair their recent long abstinence from forage, whilst the abbreviated tails of those which had been improved by mutilation, formed the jest of a group of grinning savages. Clumps of lofty fan palms, and date trees loaded with ripe orange-coloured fruit, still screened from view the village of Ambabo, the straggling Gothic roofed wigwams composing which have the same waggon-like appearance as the huts of Tajura,--a similar style of architecture extending even to the unostentatious mosque, alone distinguishable from the surrounding edifices, by uncarved minarets of wood.