The town of Gallabat is five miles distant from the bed of the Atbara. It is built on the slope above a small watercourse. This rivulet and the adjacent supply of drinking water which the inhabitants use are—in all but details—as they were in Sir Samuel Baker’s time. He thus described them:—“We were horribly disgusted at the appearance of the water. A trifling stream of about two inches in depth trickled over a bed of sand, shaded by a grove of trees. The putrefying bodies of about half a dozen monkeys, three or four camels, and the remains of a number of horses, lay in and about the margin of the water. Nevertheless, the natives had scraped small holes in the sand as filters, and thus they were satisfied with this poisonous fluid; in some of these holes the women were washing their filthy clothes.”[21] There are three wells in the town from which good water is obtained. The soldiers of the garrison use this supply, and it is available for all who will take the trouble to draw from it. But generally, the inhabitants, either because they are too indolent to pull up buckets or from mere adherence to custom, prefer the “poisonous fluid” procured in the traditional way. Our quarters were in the dismantled Dervish fort, which lies on the summit of the hill, above the town. The thick brick wall which surrounded it is now ruinous. In the enclosure are barracks for a detachment of the Arab Battalion, a small rest-house, and the telegraph station. We set our boys to pitch three tents for us, and before long I had the indescribable delight of tubbing in my portable rubber bath. After this we received, in the rest-house, the interpreter whom Menelek had sent to await us. His name was Johannes. I learned that he had been three weeks in Gallabat, so perhaps it had been expected that we should travel more rapidly than we did. With him were an assistant, by name Walda Mariam, officially attached to his “mission,” and a servant. Johannes was a tall, handsome man, with grizzled hair and beard. In person he seemed cleanly, but his _shama_—the toga-like robe, also known as “quarry,”[22] which is universally worn by Abyssinians—was soiled. It is unfashionable, and even a breach of established custom, for a man to appear in a clean _shama_ except at rare intervals. As all sorts and conditions of men in the country are infested by vermin it may be imagined that an Abyssinian’s clothes usually add nothing to the pleasure of his company.