“What a prospect! How gay with its variety of hue,--green, red and yellow! Nothing could be more pleasant than the shade of the acacia, nothing more striking than the abundance of bloom of the Abyssinian aloe, transforming the dreary sand beds into smiling gardens. Green were the tabbes-grass and the acacias, yellow and red were the aloes, and in such crowded masses, that I was involuntarily reminded of the splendour of the tulip beds of the Netherlands: but here the garden lay in a waste of gloomy black stone. One special charm of a desert journey is that it is full of contrasts, that it brings close together dearth and plenty, death and life; it opens the eyes of the traveller to the minutest benefits of nature, and demonstrates how every enjoyment is allied to a corresponding deprivation.” When he reached the Nile, coming from Suakin, he was received at Berber by an old acquaintance, M. Lafargue, who was settled in that starting-point for Suakin as a merchant and French vice-consul. Lafargue, himself an experienced traveller on the Upper Nile, received the German explorers with that hearty hospitality “which many other desert wanderers have proved besides myself.” “Sir Samuel Baker [writes Schweinfurth] aptly compares such receptions to the oasis in the desert. No necessity for letters of introduction here as with us in Europe, no hollow forms of speech, exchanging courtesies which perchance mean the very reverse; no empty compliment of at best a tedious dinner; but here in the Egyptian Sudan we are received with free and genial amiability; all Europeans are fellow-citizens, and everything is true and hearty. ‘What pleases me the most is the ease with which you travel in this country; you come, you go, you return again as though it were a walk.’ Such were M. Lafargue’s cordial words to me. We parted well pleased with one another; I shall not see him again.” About that part of the journey from Berber to Khartum by way of the Nile Schweinfurth gives a vivid description. For the first part of the voyage, as far as Shendi and Matammah, the only considerable towns in this district, the shore offered nothing attractive. It reminded him of the Egyptian valley of the Nile only in two places,--the mouth of the Atbara, and one spot where the renowned pyramids of Meroe formed a noble background. Matammah was then a populous town, but dull and unenterprising. The buildings, constructed of Nile earth, were insignificant in themselves, and irregularly crowded together in a mass like huge ant-hills; not a single tree afforded shade in the dreary streets, which were filthy with dirt.