As I expected, Said is knocked up and lamed. The Marabout has cheated Said all along out of his rides, under pretence of his having made him a pair of shoes. This Marabout is the cunningest, cruellest rogue I ever met with. But I must here relate a service which he rendered me of considerable importance. Nobody could pronounce, at any rate _recollect_, my name. Mohammed said to me one day, "_Ingleez_, we have many names, have you no more than one? The ghafalah can't learn your name, it's too difficult. Make a name like ours, if you haven't one." I then told him I had another, _James_, and that it was in Arabic, _Yâkob_. Hereupon, his eyes moved round wildly with joy, and he cried out,--"That's it! that's it!" He immediately started off amongst all the people, calling out my name was "_Yâkob_." This _second_ christening in The Sahara was an immense advantage to me. There is now not an oasis in the wildest and farthest region of the Great Desert but what has heard of _Yâkob_. When I arrived at Ghat I was astonished to find even the Touaricks calling me _Yâkob, as if I had been brought up with them_. Clapperton and the rest of his party adopted Mahometan names, and were wise in doing so. When I was in Fezzan, Clapperton's Arabic name of _Abdallah_ was mentioned more than twenty years after his death in Soudan. Denham was called The _Rais_, being an officer. The road from The Mountains to Seenawan is very good. The greater part, indeed, is beautiful broad carriage-road. It is generally well marked with camel-paths, about a foot wide. These well-beaten, well-trodden paths, are very sinuous, running one into another, and often are in great numbers, running parallel in serpentine style, and containing a united breadth of a hundred yards. There are a few places where no road-traces are apparent to the European eye, but the well-practised eye of the Bedouin camel-driver, like the eye of the Indian in the American Wilderness, can see things, and shapes, and signs in The Desert which entirely escape us. Along the line of route small heaps of stone are placed, said by my Marabout "to point out the way." We did not meet a single traveller all the four days, no small parties--no couriers--no one. I shall not soon forget our reaching Seenawan. It was a few hours after midnight. I looked forward to it as the haven of rest from all my sufferings. A fellow-traveller came up to me, (for I had been asking all night long to see it,) and said, "See, Yâkob, there is the _Nukhlah_ (palms) of Seenawan." Looking through the shadowy moon-light, I thought I saw something very small and black, and made a start at it from my camel as if I was going to leap into a downy bed of rest under the eternal shade of grateful palms. When the object is grasped, how its value vanishes! We threw down the mattress under the shade of a little ruined round tower, and I fell asleep. But such a tempest got up that the people