Taking this country generally, I can safely say it is as uninteresting and arid a country as any we have ever visited. Our way perpetually led through valleys winding between low brown mountains, the dry river beds of which were studded here and there with acacia-trees. Occasionally one got a glimpse of the majestic spurs of Erba, and occasionally a fantastic rock or a hill-slope a trifle greener than the rest would temporarily raise our spirits.
As for water, we had the greatest difficulty about it, and our guides always enveloped its existence with a shroud of mystery. Men would be sent off to the hills with a camel, and return to the camp with skins of water from somewhere, probably from gulleys where rain-water still lay; but until we reached Wadi Hadai, after a ride of six days, we never saw water with our own eyes after leaving Hadi. More water can be obtained by digging. There is a great deal of Mesembryanthemum about, which probably supplies the place of water to most of the animals living in these regions. A good many doves came to drink at the water in the evening.
Two days more brought us to Wadi Hadai, where we were to halt awhile to rest the camels. On the hill immediately above us was the circular fort, with its door to the east, to which I shall later allude, and on the plain below was another and smaller Kufic tower, several round buildings, and large stones erected on several of the adjacent hills evidently to act as landmarks. Also here we saw many graves of the Debalohp family—neat heaps of white stones, with a double row of white stones forming a pattern around them, and a headstone towards Mecca, on one of which was a rude Arabic inscription. These tombs reminded us very forcibly of the Bogos tombs in Northern Abyssinia, and evidently point to a kinship of custom.
The place where we stayed in a wood of thorny trees was at the branching of two valleys. We always had cold nights, but our widely spread camp looked cheery enough with eight fires; there were so many different parties.
Once we got into Wadi Hadai we were in Debalohp's country. He was chief of the large and powerful Kilab tribe, half of which owns avowed allegiance to the Khalifa, and the other half, with their chief, is put down as wavering by the Government at Sawakin. Luckily we did not know this at the time, or otherwise I question if we should have ventured to put ourselves so entirely in his hands, with the horrors of a visit to Khartoum, as experienced by Slatin Pasha, so fresh in our memories.
At Hadai for the first time during the whole of our journey our interests were keenly aroused in certain antiquities we found—antiquities about which Debalohp had said a good deal, but about which we had never ventured to indulge any hopes.
Hard by the Debalohp mausoleum was another Kufic tower, though much smaller than those we had seen on the coast, and not covered with white cement, and in the same locality were several foundations of circular buildings very neatly executed in dry masonry, which appeared to have at either end the bases of two circular towers and curious bulges, which at once reminded us of our South African ruins. On climbing an adjacent hill we found a circular fort, evidently constructed for strategical purposes, with a doorway, the ends of the wall being rounded, quite a counterpart of the smaller ruin on the Lundi river in Mashonaland. The analogy was indeed curious, and we talked about it hesitatingly to ourselves, as yet unable to give any satisfactory reason for its existence. On various heights around were cairns erected as if for landmarks, and we felt that here at last we were in the presence of one of those ancient mysteries which it is so delightful to solve.
We had as interpreter from Arabic to Hadendowa, as none of our party understood that language, the sheikh whose name was Hassan Bafori. He brought three coursing dogs with him. We had also with us a certain Annibàle Piacentini as general odd man. He was really Italian, but had lived so long among Greeks in Suez that he was always called Annibale. He talked Greek with my husband, Mattaios, and me, and English with the others, besides Arabic.
We rested our camels and our men at Hadai, and drank of some fresh water from a little pool, the first we had seen in this barren country, which was supplied by a tiny stream that made its appearance for a few yards in a sheltered corner of the valley, a stream of priceless value in this thirsty land. Debalohp suggested to my husband that he knew of some ruins in a neighbouring valley to which he could take him, but it was not without considerable hesitation that he decided to go. A long day's ride in this hot country, supposed to be almost, if not quite, within the Dervish sphere of influence, was not lightly to be undertaken, more especially as he had been on so many fruitless errands in search of ruins at suggestions of the Bedouin, and returned disgusted, and when he mounted his camel next morning, without any hope of finding anything, and sure of a fatiguing day, had a reasonable excuse offered itself, he would probably not have gone. But the unexpected in these cases is always happening. The long ride turned out only to be one of three hours. Wadi Gabeit was somewhat more fertile and picturesque than any we had as yet seen, and as a climax to it all came the discovery of an ancient gold-mine, worked in ages long gone by doubtless by that mysterious race whose tombs and buildings we had been speculating upon.
Diodorus, in his account of an old Egyptian gold-mine, describes most accurately what my husband found in the Wadi Gabeit. For miles along it at the narrower end were the ruins of miners' huts; both up the main valley and up all the collateral ones there must have been seven or eight hundred of them at the lowest computation. Then there were hundreds of massive crushing-stones, neatly constructed out of blocks of basalt, which had been used for breaking the quartz, lying in wild confusion amongst the ruined huts, and by the side of what once was a stream, but is now only a sandy, choked-up river-bed. On a high rock in the middle of the valley he found a trifle of a Greek inscription scratched by a miner, who had evidently been working the rich quartz vein just below it.
