The daily morning journal and courier., 1896-08-31
RIDING OVER THE DESERT.

It is Not Always Unpleasant Travel | ing on the Waste of Sahara. | Wishing to give aru baggage camels | another days rest before starting on the trying journey from Murat Wells | to Wady Halfa we profited by the de- I lay to take a long ride out on the Abu-
 Hamed road with our good friend, Ab-
 dul Azim Bey. The ostensible object of
 this excursion was to see a huge rock | in the shape of a crocodile that Abdul
 Azim had discovered not long since
 about a couple of hours out from Murat
 and few hundred yeards away from
 the Abu-H -Hamed caravan track. This
 rock, said our guide, had never yet been
 seen by Europeans.
 | Mounting on a couple of our friends
 best bred running camels, and escorted l by some half dozen well armed tribes
 men on small active beasts as swift as our own, we set out at that fast trot l which Is as pleasant on a we'll bred
 Hadjuv as on a rough, hardset brute
 it is excruciatlngly painful. It was just after dawn, and the air was delicious. l for the sun does not begin to get really l fierce until after a. m, and as we
 wound down the Khor and out among the Kopjes of the desert with pleas I ant breeze flaming our faces, with the l camels' pads striking crisply on the 1 firm, gravelly sand, and the men's ac- coutrements jingling rhythmically as | they logged along, we felt our blood 1 jingle and our spirits buoyant that we
 really were at last well within the enc my's borders.
 l For, as Abdul AziR said, when we | had ridden an hour or so only one Eu- l ropean, since the Nile campaign, had 1 been nearer Khartoum than ourselves.
 This adventurous spirit was Colonel
 Bundle Pasha, who in 1885 and or 1886 l rode so far toward Abu-H Haned that from hilltop he was able to see that
 town and the Nile.
 I Not alone were ourselves affected by 1 that lovely morning It's glamour was
 over our escort of Ababdeh (generally 1 the most taciturn of folk) four of whom
 at hot speed in thier quaint, primitive l language, with its absurd, bewildering
 ''cl-k," interjected it would seem quite 1 involuntarly, at every sixth or seventh
 word while the other two were chant 1 ing alternate verses of lugubrious
 song in whose refrain the moan of the
 sakeeah, the, buzz of a saw, and the
 creaking of an ungreased wagon wheel
 appeared to be deftly blended with the
 grousing of a refractory camel
 | The camels themselves seemed affect
 ed by this moaning or, perhaps, 1t was l by the song They all demeaned them
 selves quite skittishly, and one was so
 overcome by his sense of the joyous ness of things that he began suddenly 1 to buck. Now a bucking camel is, of
 all the pleasant sights in nature, the
 most laughable. The great beast seems
 Tat these moments of expansion to put l off his camel nature, and to imagine
 himself literally the humming bird to l him.
 For instance, when the spirit emoves him to buck, the camel of a sudden
 hurls his great bulk high in the air,
 spreading out all his splay limbs at right angles to his unwiefGy carcass.
 And he alights after this grotesque eff l fort, with his feet all abroad, and a
 rock-splitting, e-dissolving thud,
 only to make fresh and more extrav- gant departure.I It is a soul-stirring per- l formance. He brings marvellous per- | severance to the exercise, and will keep l it up over half mile of country. But | it is the humming bird he is aping all
 the while the graceful colibri flashing | jewel-like into the air (here the camel | projects himself into space) or poising