196 
GRAND DESERT PROSPECT. 
ficient supply of water. This wady lies east and 
Tajetterat west. 
Our course had been over an elevated rocky 
plain ; but I had no idea of the height to which we 
had arrived. Suddenly the ground broke up on 
either side of the track into rocky eminences, and 
we now came to the brow of a sharp descent The 
valley of Aroukeen wound as it were like a snake 
far down at the bottom of an immense hollow, sur- 
rounded on all sides by an amphitheatre of savage- 
looking mountains — great stony swells, made hideous 
here and there by crags and ravines, and piled away 
on all sides in shattered magnificence. This is the 
grandest desert prospect I have yet seen, and must 
strongly clash with the ordinary notion of the Great 
Sahara which untravelled geologists have repre- 
sented as the recently-elevated bed of some ocean. 
We must now have reached the summit of an in- 
land Atlas, dividing the extreme limits of the Ghat 
territory from the, to us, mysterious kingdom of 
Aheer. 
In Wady Aroukeen there are some of the 
finest tholukhs I have seen, reaching the height of 
thirty or forty feet. There are, besides, two new 
species of trees, the adwa of Soudan, called, in Aheer, 
ahorah : they have not been observed before, and are 
natives of Bornou. Their general aspect resembles 
the tholukh, but they have large prickles and a 
smooth roundish leaf. There is a good deal of 
hasheesh in this valley. 
