The preliminary stage ended with disembarking at the Fort, El-Muwaylah, all our stores and properties, including sundry cases of cartridges and five hundred pounds of pebble-powder, which had been stored immediately under the main cabin and its eternal cigarettes and allumettes. The implements, as well as the provisions, were made over to the charge of an old Albanian, one Rajab Aghá, who at first acted as our magazine-man for a consideration of two napoleons per month, in advance if possible. This done, the Mukhbir returned into the dock Yáhárr, in order to patch up her kettle, which seemed to grow worse under every improvement. We accompanied her, after ordering a hundred camels to be collected; well knowing that as this was the Bairam, 'Id, or "Greater Festival," nothing whatever would be done during its three days' duration. The respite was not unwelcome to me; it seemed to offer an opportunity for recovering strength. At Cairo I had taken the advice of a learned friend (if not an "Apostle of Temperance," at any rate sorely afflicted with the temperance idea), who, by threats of confirmed gout and lumbago, fatty degeneration of the heart and liver, ending in the possible rupture of some valve, had persuaded me that man should live upon a pint of claret per diem. How dangerous is the clever brain with a monomania in it! According to him, a glass of sherry before dinner was a poison, whereas half the world, especially the Eastern half, prefers its potations preprandially; a quarter of the liquor suffices, and both appetite and digestion are held to be improved by it. The result of "turning over a new leaf," in the shape of a phial of thin "Gladstone," was a lumbago which lasted me a long month, and which disappeared only after a liberal adhibition of "diffusible stimulants." It required no small faith in one's good star to set out for a six weeks' work in the Desert under such conditions. My consolation, however, was contained in the lines attributed to half a dozen who wrote good English:-- "He either fears his fate too much, Or his deserts are small, Who dares not put it to the touch, To gain or lose it all." This time, however, Mind was tranquil, whatever Matter might suffer. As the novelist says, "Lighting upon a grain of gold or silver betokens that a mine of the precious metal must be in the neighbourhood." It had been otherwise with my first Expedition: a forlorn hope, a miracle of moral audacity; the heaviest of responsibilities incurred upon the slightest of justifications, upon the pinch of sand which a tricky and greedy old man might readily have salted. It reminds me of a certain "Philip sober," who in the morning fainted at the sight of the precipice which he had scaled when "Philip drunk." I look back with amazement upon No. I. NOTE. The second Khedivial Expedition to Midian was composed of the following officers and men. The European staff numbered four, not including the commander, viz.:--