132 J'KOfEEDIKGS OF TIIK HOVAL SOCIETY OF QUEENSLAND, 



of the literature of geology in most of the European languages^ 

 and all the while was working hard with Huxley at biology. 

 Never very strong, my strength began to fail, for I was working 

 double tides, grudging every hour of sleep. So when I was 

 offered the ^jost, vacated by Clement (afterwards Sir Clement) 

 le Neve Foster, of assistant geologist to Ismail Pasha, Khedive 

 of Egypt, inchnation and health caused me to accept at once, 

 and so good-bye to all hopes of a School of IVIines diploma : I 

 did not care to grow learned by ." degrees " Avhen I could 

 acquire knowledge in the bulk, and on Christmas Day, 1869, 

 I landed in Alexandria with H. Bauerman as chief and John 

 Keast Lord as naturalist. 



How gladly would I here tell of the glamour of Egypt. 

 He who quaffs the waters of Old Nilus shall long therefor 

 for ever, said Herodotus ; and it is true, for from that da}^ 

 to this my love of Egyptology has known no abatement. 

 In the old-fashioned sloop-of-war '" Tor " we visited every 

 headland and bay on the Red Sea coast, from old forgotten 

 Berenice the Roman port for their emerald mines and porphyry 

 quarries, to beyond Bab-el-Mandeb where at Zeyla the raised 

 coral reefs, far inland, shine like silver diadems on the dusk}' 

 basalt brows of Ethiopia. We made extensive journeys 

 inland by camel and on horseback into Nubia and Abyssinia. 

 In Egypt I found neolithic stone implements, in Nubia stone - 

 circles perch halfway up the mountain-side on tiny plateaus, 

 and in some of the wadies both in Abyssinia and Arabia I 

 found palaeolithic implements that my colleagues laughed at. 



In long camel-rides across the desert I had unique oppor- 

 tunities of studying the action of blown sand, but my glory 

 was the Red Sea coast which I knew^ from end to end along 

 the African and on many parts of the Asiatic shores. This 

 great rift valley was to me one splendidly clear section 1,500 

 miles long, the story of whose rises and falls was written in 

 white coral upon dark rock. It is one vast fold, depressed in 

 the middle, elevated at the Suez and Somali ends, the latter 

 being the highest part. Atoll and barrier and fringing and 

 raised reef tell the story gra]ihically — the raised reefs off 

 Shadwan in the north make a white streak on the black diorites^ 

 it sinks to sea-level as you go south and the barrier rfeefs 

 stretch outwards into the sea, till in the central depression 

 the Dahlac Isles lie as atoll jewels under the burning skies. 

 Southwards the raised reefs come on again and reach their 



