Our travellers returned by a parallel line, southerly and more direct. In the Wady 'Urnub, the Ma'ázah of the Salímát clan received them with apparent kindness, inwardly grumbling the while at their land being "spied out;" and they especially welcomed Furayj, who, being a brave soldier, is also noted as a peacemaker. All the men were armed, and wore the same dress as the Huwaytát; like these, they also breed camels and asses--that is, they are not cow-Arabs. Certain travellers on the Upper Nile have distributed the Bedawin into these two groups; add horse-Arabs and ass-Arabs, and you have all the divisions of the race as connected with the so-called "lower animals." About three hours (= eleven miles) from Sharmá camp, some pyramids of sand were pointed out in the Wady Rátiyah: the Bedawin call one of them the Goz et-Hannán ("Moaning Sand-heap"). They declare that when the Hajj-caravan passes, or rather used to pass, by that way, before the early sixteenth century, when Sultán Selim laid out his maritime high-road, a Naubah ("orchestra") was wont to sound within its bowels. This tale, which, by-the-by, is told of two other places in Midian, may have been suggested by the Jebel el-Nákús ("Bell Mountain") in Sinai-land; but as the Arabs perform visitation and sacrifice to the "Moaning-heap," the superstition probably dates from ancient days. Ruins are also reported to exist in the Jebel Fa's, the southern boundary of the 'Urnub valley; and, further south, in the Jebel el-Harb, I was told by some one whose name has escaped me, of a dolmen mounted upon three supports. Lieutenant Amir also brought copper ore from the Wady 'Urnub, and from the Ras Wady el-Mukhbir specimens of a metal which the Arabs use as a kohl or collyrium. It proved, however, iron, not antimony; and the same mistake has been made in the Sinaitic Peninsula. At Wady Sharmá we rigged up, under the superintendence of M. Philipin, a trough and a cradle for washing the black sands, the pounded quartz of the Jebel el-Abyaz, and the red sands; these latter had shown a trace of silver (1/10000) to the first Expedition. We mixed it with mercury and amalgamed it in goatskins; the men moved them to and fro; but, of course, the water evaporated, and the mass speedily became dry. The upper or superficial white yielded only, as far as our engineer could judge, a little copper and bright knobs of pyrites. The Negros, or iridized formations, of the "Filon Husayn" on a lower horizon, gave the dubious result already alluded to. All the experiments were conducted in the rudest way. Of course, a quantity of metal may have escaped notice; and a fair proportion of the powdered stone was reserved for scientific treatment in Europe.