rock-range explained the absence of cold, so remarkable during
all this excursion--hence the African traveller ever avoids
camping near bare stones. Dew, however, wetted our boxes like
thin rain: the meteor, remarked for the first time on March 13th,
will last, they say, three months, and will greatly forward
vegetation. It seems to be uncertain, or rather to be influenced
by conditions which we had no opportunity of studying: at times
it would be exceptionally heavy, and in other places it was
entirely absent. Before evening new contract-boots, bought from
the Mukhbir, were distributed to the soldiers and all the
quarrymen, who limped painfully on their poor bare feet:--next
day all wore their well-hidden old boots.

Early on March 14th we ascended the Wady el-Kaimah, which showed
a singular spectacle, and read us another lecture upon the
diversity of formation which distinguishes this region. An abrupt
turn then led over rough ground, the lower folds of the Umm
Furut, where a great granite gorge, the Nakb Abu Shar, ran up to
a depression in the dorsum, an apparently practicable Col.
Suddenly the rocks assumed the quaintest hues and forms. The
quartz, slaty-blue and black, was here spotted and streaked with
a dull, dead white, as though stained by the droppings of myriad
birds: there it lay veined and marbled with the most vivid of
rainbow colours-- reds and purples, greens and yellows, set off
by the pale chalky white. Evident signs of work were remarked in
a made road running up to the Jebel el-Maru (proper), whose
strike is 38 (mag.), and whose dip is westward. It is an arete,
a cock's-comb of snowy quartz some sixty feet high by forty-five
broad at the base; crowning a granitic fold that descends
abruptly, with a deep fall on either side, from the "Mother of