This is our second day of Khamsin; yet on the northern slope of
the great Fiumara we meet the cool land-wind. Either it or the
sea-breeze generally sets in between seven and eight a.m., when
the stony, sandy world has been thoroughly sunned. The short
divide beyond the far bank of the Sirr is strewn with glittering
mica-schist that takes the forms of tree-trunks and rotten wood;
and with dark purple-blue fragments of clay-slate looking as if
they had been worked. A counterslope of the same material, which
makes excellent path-metal placed us in the Wady Rubayyigh ("the
Little Rabigh" or "Green-grown Spring"), a short and
proportionally very broad branch draining to the Sirr. Here large
outcrops of quartz mingled with the clay slate. A few yards
further it abutted upon a small gravelly basin with ruins and a
huge white reef of "Mara," which caused a precipitate
dismounting. We had marched only four hours (= thirteen miles);
but the loss of time has its compensations. Our Arabs, who
consider this a fair day's work, will now, in hopes of a halt,
show us every strew of quartz and every fragment of wall. They
congratulated us upon reaching a part of their country absolutely
unvisited by Europeans.

The site of our discovery was the water-parting of the Wady
Rubayyigh with the Wady Rabigh, both feeders of the Sirr; this to
the north, that to the south. The ruins, known as Umm el-Harab,
"Mother of Desolation," are the usual basement-lines: they lie in
the utterly waterless basin, our camping-ground, stretching west
of Mara Rubayyigh, the big white reef. This "Mother" bears nearly
north of Umm el-Karayat, in north lat. 26 33' 36" (Ahmed
Kaptan): her altitude was made upwards of a thousand feet above