RAIN — ANOTHER INUNDATION. 251 
freshness of the herbage, the rainy season is just 
beginning in Aheer. There is not yet very abund- 
ant herbage, but it will soon greatly increase. 
The rain continues to pour in torrents, the 
boundary mountains on either hand are scarcely 
visible, and a watery vapour prevents us from 
tracing the course of the valley. We have hitherto 
had to struggle against mental anxieties, against 
fatigues, heat, drought, and thirst: we have now 
to contend with rain and with floods. Everything 
is becoming awfully damp, and everybody looks 
awfully dismal. I can see, from the lugubrious 
countenances of the Kailouees and the blacks, that 
the rainy season is their real winter. They go 
shivering about, and seem as if they were half 
drowned. Our Bornou gauze-cotton tent still bears 
up well, however, and keeps out the rain. 
I was engaged in admiring the tent, and in re- 
flecting on the changed region into which we had 
entered — a region of luxuriant vegetation and 
watery atmosphere — when there was again a wild 
holloa of " The floods are pouring down upon us ! 
The wady is coming Our people, however, con- 
tented themselves at first with shouting, and made no 
preparations for the advancing flood ; but in a short 
time they found it necessary to bestir themselves, 
and began to make dams and dykes, with the aid 
of sticks and hatches. These expedients proved 
of no avail. The waters swelled wildly up, higher 
and higher, and sheets of foaming waves came 
