superior to camels' flesh.

_9th._--We rose, and, with our accustomed regularity, started before
daybreak in search of water, for the Kailouees are without this element
essential to life in the desert. Having continued about six hours and
a-half, we encamped in Wady Aroukeen. It would not have been necessary
to come to this place, had our imprudent Kailouees taken in a sufficient
supply of water. This wady lies east and Tajetterat west.

Our course had been over an elevated rocky plain; but I had no idea of
the height to which we had arrived. Suddenly the ground broke up on
either side of the track into rocky eminences, and we now came to the
brow of a sharp descent. The valley of Aroukeen wound as it were like a
snake far down at the bottom of an immense hollow, surrounded on all
sides by an amphitheatre of savage-looking mountains--great stony
swells, made hideous here and there by crags and ravines, and piled away
on all sides in shattered magnificence. This is the grandest desert
prospect I have yet seen, and must strongly clash with the ordinary
notion of the Great Sahara which untravelled geologists have represented
as the recently-elevated bed of some ocean. We must now have reached the
summit of an inland Atlas, dividing the extreme limits of the Ghât
territory from the, to us, mysterious kingdom of Aheer.

In Wady Aroukeen there are some of the finest tholukhs I have seen,
reaching the height of thirty or forty feet. There are, besides, two new
species of trees, the adwa of Soudan, called, in Aheer, _aborah_: they
have not been observed before, and are natives of Bornou. Their general
aspect resembles the tholukh, but they have large prickles and a smooth
roundish leaf. There is a good deal of hasheesh in this valley.