PERFUMED ATMOSPHERE. 457 



Even the very skins of the animals he shot were 

 deliciously scented by contact with it. So again the 

 well-known German traveller and botanist, Dr. Schwein- 

 furth, in his passage through the sterile tract between 

 Suakim and Berber, in the Egyptian Soudan, mentions 

 the delicious aroma emitted by the herbage at night. 

 The air, he says, " was laden with scents which the 

 stores of the perfumer could not rival, and such as 

 no quarter of the world could surpass." * These 

 perfumes he goes on to explain, were principally due 

 to a little mountain weed (a " pulicaria ") whose 

 refreshing aromatic odour rendered the whole atmosphere 

 sweet scented. Dr. Schweinfurth was at this time 

 crossing the tract of desert between Suakim and Berber, 

 and was encamped among the barren hills only a march 

 or two from the coast, near a district which afterwards 

 became famous as the scene of some of the fiercest 

 battles fought between the British and the Arabs 

 during the Soudan War of 1884. 



Then again in " Le Desert " by Pierre Loti of L'Aca- 

 demie Francaise, which has but lately been published, 

 the following description is given of the scented herbage 

 of the Sinai peninsula in which he was encamped. 

 There had been a night of severe storm and rain; 

 followed by one of those lovely mornings of serene 

 beauty which as frequently follow rain in these regions, 



"In the fresh tranquil morning" (says the French Acade- 

 mician) " at sunrise, when I open my tent, a puff of perfume 

 reaches me with the outside air: so powerful, that it seemed 

 as if someone had broken a pitcher full of aromatics before 

 my door. And the whole of this solitary valley of granite 



* The Heart of Africa, by Dr. Georg Schweinfurth, 2nd Edit., 1874, 

 Vol. i., p. 20. Translated from the German by Ellen F. Frazer. 



