at present its luster proclaimed to him
his own misfortune. For a few nights there shone for him the pale,
scattered, and sad zodiacal light, which, after the waning of the
evening twilight, silvered until a late hour the western side of the
sky.

XV

In two weeks after starting from the neighborhood of Wadi Haifa the
caravan entered upon the region subdued by the Mahdi. They speedily
crossed the hilly Jesira Desert, and near Shendi, where previously the
English forces had completely routed Musa, Uled of Helu, they rode into
a locality entirely unlike the desert. Neither sands nor dunes could be
seen here. As far as the eye could reach stretched a steppe overgrown
in part by green grass and in part by a jungle amid which grew clusters
of thorny acacias, yielding the well-known Sudanese gum; while here and
there stood solitary gigantic nabbuk trees, so expansive that under
their boughs a hundred people could find shelter from the sun. From
time to time the caravan passed by high, pillar-like hillocks of
termites or white ants, with which tropical Africa is strewn. The
verdure of the pasture and the acacias agreeably charmed the eyes after
the monotonous, tawny-hued sands of the desert.

In the places where the steppe was a meadow, herds of camels pastured,
guarded by the armed warriors of the Mahdi. At the sight of the caravan
they started up suddenly, like birds of prey; rushed towards it,
surrounded it from all sides; and shaking their spears and at the same
time yelling at the top of their voices they asked the men from whence
they came, why they were going southward, and whither they were bound?
At times they assumed such a threatening attitude that Idris was
compelled to reply to their questions in the greatest haste in order to
avoid attack.

Stas, who had imagined that the inhabitants of the Sudan differed from
other Arabs residing in Egypt only in this, that they believed in the
Mahdi and did not want to acknowledge the authority of the Khedive,
perceived that he was totally mistaken. The greater part of those who
every little while stopped the caravan had skins darker than even Idris
and Gebhr, and in comparison with the two Bedouins were almost black.
The negro blood in them predominated over the Arabian. Their faces and
breasts were tattooed and the prickings represented various designs, or
inscriptions from the Koran. Some were almost naked; others wore
"jubhas" or wrappers of cotton texture sewed ou