“He was the most magnificent specimen of an Arab that I have ever seen. Although upwards of eighty years of age, he was as erect as a lance, and did not appear more than between fifty and sixty; he was of Herculean stature, about six feet three inches high, with immensely broad shoulders and chest, a remarkably arched nose; eyes like an eagle, beneath large, shaggy, but perfectly white eyebrows; a snow-white beard of great thickness descended below the middle of his breast. He wore a white turban, and a white cashmere abbai or long robe, from the throat to the ankles. As a desert patriarch he was superb, the very perfection of all that the imagination could paint, if we would personify Abraham at the head of his people.” This fine old Sheikh brought ten of his sons, most of them as tall as himself. He seems to have been the father of many children,--a fortunate circumstance for the country, though no doubt nearly all of his stalwart descendants were extirpated in the miserable wars following on the Mahdi’s revolt. Baker ascended the Atbara to its upper waters, where it is known as the Settit (higher up still as the Takaze). Here he had magnificent hunting of big game amongst the Hamran Arabs, whose extraordinary prowess with the sword he describes most vividly. They would follow up elephants and hamstring them with a single blow of their long weapons, which were like those of the Crusaders. (As a matter of fact, the generality of the Hamran swords were manufactured at Sollingen in Germany.) In this land Baker saw innumerable giraffes, and most of the big antelopes of Central Africa, including Kudu and Oryx. The country about the Upper Atbara below the Abyssinian highlands was exactly like an English park, though the trees were mainly acacias. Here and there was a gigantic baobab. In the waters of the river was found the now well-known Lung-fish, the _Protopterus_. From the upper waters of the Atbara and its many tributaries Baker, skirting the western terraces of Abyssinia, reached the river Rahad,--an Egyptian affluent of the Blue Nile which flows nearly parallel to the river Dinder. These two streams rise on the western flanks of the Abyssinian tableland, and enter the Blue Nile about one hundred miles southeast of Khartum. On his way down this river Baker, in the country of Galabat, met two German lay missionaries proceeding to Abyssinia in spite of the objection expressed to their presence by King Theodore. “One of these preachers was a blacksmith, whose iron constitution had entirely given way, and the little strength that remained he exhausted in endless quotations of texts from the Bible, which he considered applicable to every trifling event or expression.”