It is evident, therefore, that we shall have some serious difficulties to encounter even between this and Antalo; still, we may expect to be at that town by the end of the month. From thence to Magdala it is 160 miles, or thereabouts; for it is impossible to reckon within twenty miles in a country where the mountains and gorges necessitate such constant windings. I mentioned in my last letter that bets were freely offered and taken that we arrive at Magdala by the 15th of April. The whole question is one of provision and transport; and the most casual examination of the question will show that it will be a very long time before the provision for the onward march can be collected at Antalo. I related in my letters a month since how hard a task it was to feed the troops at Senafe and along the pass, and to accumulate provisions in our advance to Attegrat. Senafe is only five days’ march from Zulla; Antalo is sixteen; and, allowing for the mules to stop one day at Senafe, and one at Attegrat, to rest, which would be absolutely necessary, it is eighteen days from Zulla. We shall have twice as many troops to feed at Antalo as we had at Senafe; and as it is three times as long a journey, it will require six times as many transport-animals to feed the troops at Antalo now to what were required to feed the former force at Senafe. In addition to this, we shall have a body of troops at Attegrat, and another at Senafe, to feed. The Transport Train is more efficient now than it was a month since, but it is not greatly more numerous, as the number of fresh arrivals is almost balanced by the number of mules going daily into hospital, broken down with over-work, bad feeding, and sore backs brought on by the pack-saddles. The fact of the road being now practicable for carts to Senafe, is also an assistance to the Transport Train; but I confess that I cannot see how they will manage to provision all the line, much less to accumulate stores. It is, we have just seen, eighteen days from Zulla to Antalo. Supposing that the mules go regularly up and down, stopping two days at each end to rest, it will take them forty days to make the circuit. Putting the number of available transport-animals at 16,000, which is over the mark, there would be only four hundred a-day to start from the sea-coast. When it is remembered that these four hundred animals would have to carry their own food for those places at which grain cannot be obtained, that they have to carry the rations for their drivers for the forty days, that they have to provision the different minor posts, together with Senafe and Attegrat, it will be seen that the quantity of provisions which will reach Antalo daily will be by no means excessive. And yet, before we can move forward from Antalo, on a journey which, going and returning, and with a pause of a week at Magdala, can hardly be calculated as under two months, we must have accumulated there a