From Khartoum he travelled in a caravan of camels, chartered by him for an escort, leaving the Nile and striking into the desert. With camel-drivers hard to control, with a burning sun overhead, and sands nearly as hot beneath, he traversed the desert unharmed. Once he slept with a deadly snake under his blanket, unconscious of his fearful danger until he rolled up his blanket in the morning. The open air, the free sun, sleeping on the sand, and eating the coarse food of the natives, gave him a vigor and healthy delight which inconveniences and dangers could not overcome. Sometimes the heat was so intense that the skin of his face peeled off, and once or twice he felt the effects of “the desert intoxication,” resulting from the monotonous scene and terrible heat. It was a dizzy sensation, and is often thought to be a symptom of dangerous disease. Changing camels at intermediate stations, and visiting the ruins of ancient cities and fortresses, where he found them cropping out of the sand or adorning some rugged mountain, he travelled on to Abdom, Dongola and Wady-Halfa, where he embarked in a boat for Assouan. His parting with his old dromedary, and with his guides, at Wady-Halfa, is mentioned by him with the same regret that he experienced in leaving his other friends. But his farewell, in Cairo, to his trusted servant Achmet, who had been his faithful companion from Cairo up the Nile and back, drew tears from the eyes of both. His voyage from Wady-Halfa to Cairo was so nearly like his trip up the Nile, that for the purposes of this work it is necessary only to say that he visited many scenes and many ruins which were omitted on his way up the river, and refreshed his memory by a second visit to the most celebrated localities. He met many travellers, and heard from civilization again, arriving in the capital of Egypt on the first day of April, 1852, in excellent spirits and in good health, save a troublesome soreness of the eyes, caused by the reflection of the sun on the water. The thin and frail body had assumed a fullness and strength surprising to note, and the broken heart had so accustomed itself to its load of grief that the weight seemed lighter than at first. On the Nile he wrote a poem containing among others, these expressive lines:— “Mysterious Flood,—that through the silent sands Hast wandered, century on century, Watering the length of green Egyptian lands, Which were not, but for thee,—” “Thou guardest temple and vast pyramid, Where the gray Past records its ancient speech; But in thine unrevealing breast lies hid What they refuse to teach.” “What were to thee the Osirian festivals? Or Memnon’s music on the Theban plain? The carnage, when Cambyses made thy halls Ruddy with royal slain?” “In thy solemnity, thine awful calm, Thy grand indifference of Destiny, My soul forgets its pain, and drinks the balm Which thou dost proffer me.”