We are not acquainted with the name of the port from which the fleet set sail, nor do we know the number of weeks it took to reach the land of Puanit, neither is there any record of the incidents which befell it by the way.  It sailed past the places frequented by the mariners of the XIIth dynasty—­Suakin, Massowah, and the islands of the Ked Sea; it touched at the country of the Ilim which lay to the west of the Bab el-Mandeb, went safely through the Straits, and landed at last in the Land of Perfumes on the Somali coast.* There, between the bay of Zeilah and Bas Hafun, stretched the Barbaric region, frequented in later times by the merchants of Myos Hormos and of Berenice.

* That part of Puanit where the Egyptians landed was at first located in Arabia by Brugsch, then transferred to Somali-land by Mariette, whose opinion was accepted by most Egyptologists.  Dumichen, basing his hypothesis on a passage where Puanit is mentioned as “being on both sides of the sea,” desired to apply the name to the Arabian as well as to the African coast, to Yemen and Hadhramaut as well as to Somali-land; this suggestion was adopted by Lieblein, and subsequently by Ed. Meyer, who believed that its inhabitants were the ancestors of the Sabseans.  Since then Krall has endeavoured to shorten the distance between this country and Egypt, and he places the Puanit of Hatshopsitu between Suakin and Massowah.  This was, indeed, the part of the country known under the XIIth dynasty at the time when it was believed that the Nile emptied itself thereabouts into the Red Sea, in the vicinity of the Island of the Serpent King, but I hold, with Mariette, that the Puanit where the Egyptians of Hatshopsitu’s time landed is the present Somali-land—­a view which is also shared by Navillo, but which Brugsch, in the latter years of his life, abandoned.

[Illustration:  361.jpg AN INHABITANT OF THE LAND OF PUANIT]

     Drawn by Fauchon-Gudin, from a photograph by Gayet.

The first stations which the latter encountered beyond Cape Direh—­Avails, Malao, Mundos, and Mosylon—­were merely open roadsteads offering no secure shelter; but beyond Mosylon, the classical navigators reported the existence of several wadys, the last of which, the Elephant River, lying between Bas el-Eil and Cape Guardafui, appears to have been large enough not only to afford anchorage to several vessels of light draught, but to permit of their performing easily any evolutions required.  During the Roman period, it was there, and there only, that the best kind of incense could be obtained, and it was probably at this point also that the Egyptians of Hatshopsitu’s time landed.  The Egyptian vessels sailed up the river till they reached a place beyond the influence of the tide, and then dropped anchor in front of a village scattered along a bank fringed with sycomores and palms.*