conduit. Around the cistern lies a ruined graveyard, whose
yawning graves supplied a couple of skulls. A broken line of
masonry, probably an aqueduct, runs south-south-east (143 mag.)
towards the palms: after two hundred metres all traces of it are
lost.

The mining industry could not have been a prominent feature at
Bada, or we should have found, as in Shaghab and Shuwak, furnaces
and scoria. Yet about the tank we lit upon large scatters of
spalled quartz, which, according to the Baliyy, is brought from
the neighbouring mountains. Some of it was rosy outside: other
specimens bore stains of copper; and others showed, when broken,
little pyramids of ore. Tested in England, it proved to be pure
lead, a metal so rare that some metallurgists have doubted its
existence: the finds have been mostly confined to auriferous
lands. The blow-pipe soon showed that it was not galena (the
sulphide), but some of it contained traces of silver. Without
knowing the rarity of these specimens, certain American officers
at the Citadel, Cairo, compared them with the true galenas of the
Dar-Forian mines, called Mahattat el-Risas (the "Deposit of
Lead"), in the Wady Gotam, three days north-east of the capital
El-Fashr. The African metal is rich. Large quantities, analyzed
by Gastinel Bey, gave fifty per cent. of lead, and of silver
fifty dollars per ton; but the distance from any possible market
will reserve these diggings for the use of the future. Some were
sanguine enough to propose smelting the metal at Khartum, where
Risas is ever in demand; and accordingly, for a time Dar-For was
"run," by a mild "ring," against Midian.

The plain, I have said, is everywhere broken by piles of stone