A pilgrimage to the temples and tombs of Egypt, Nubia, and ...

A NUBIAN PALACE. 217
his Court at Derr, is Hussein Kiashef, and as I
was anxious to see a Nubian Prince in all his
glory, I sent my dragoman to solicit an audience.
Now do not be winding up your imagination
to expect a detail of an Arabian Night's Enter-
tainment, or fancy that I was about to enter a
palace of marble hung with gold and silver stuffs,
and to find a body-guard of Ethiops with jewels
in their ears in attendance upon his Highness.
Quite the reverse — ; the Kiashefs palace is a
mud-edifice, rather of a better and more spacious
description than those of his subjects, and is
preceded by sundry court-yards and flights of
broken steps, in which we found no guard of
honour, or any living thing in waiting but some
meagre-looking goats and a multitude of pigeons.
However, at the entrance of his audience chamber
we were received by a dozen attendants dressed
in white shirts and turbans, and found the Kias-
hef himself, a fine looking old man, standing
in the middle of the room to receive us. This
room, an exceedingly large one, is covered in
with beams of palm-trees thatched over with the
dried leaves of that (in this country) tree of all
work. The mud walls, guiltless of either paper
or paint, and in all the beautiful simplicity of
Nile slime hardened in the sun, looked perfectly