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This is a place of 1,000 houses, and the present mek owns large salt-works near the town, where the ground is largely impregnated with salt. Merchants from Sennaar buy up the salt and trade it as far as Abyssinia. Next to Sennaar and Cobbé in Darfour, Shendy is the largest town in the Eastern Soudan. Debauchery and drunkenness are as fashionable here as in Berber. The people are better dressed, and the women have rings of gold in their noses and ears. Shendy is the centre of considerable trade, but its principal market is for slaves, who are chiefly negroes, stolen from the interior.

The Abyssinian slave-women are reckoned the best and most faithful of all, and are bought for the harems of the Arab chiefs. As to the slave-traffic as a whole, laudable as the efforts of England have been to abolish this infamous trade in Western and South-western Africa, there does not appear to be the smallest hope of the abolition of slavery in Africa itself. It is not from foreign nations that the blacks can hope for deliverance. This great work must be effected by themselves, and this can only be done by the education of the sons of Africa in their own country and by their own countrymen.

IV.—Among Savage Arab Tribes

In the caravan for Souakin, which left Shendy on May 17, I joined myself as a poor man to a party of black traders from Western Africa. After five days spent in traversing sandy and gravelly plains, we came to the Atbara river, which has a greater variety of natural vegetation than I had seen anywhere on the banks of the Nile in Egypt. Having crossed the Atbara, our route lay to the S.E., and we soon entered the country of the Bisharein Arabs—a bold and handsome race.

The moral character of both sexes is wholly bad. They are treacherous, cruel, avaricious, and revengeful, and are restrained in the indulgence of their passions by no laws either human or divine. However, they have a dread, especially the women, of a white man, and the latter shriek at the sight of what they consider an out-cast of nature, saying, "God preserve us from the devil." On May 31 the caravan broke into two parts, one taking the direct road through the desert to Souakin, the other proceeding by Taka; and I determined to accompany the latter. We followed the course of the Atbara, and, after crossing stretches of the desert, came, on June 3, to the village of Goz Radjeb, the centre of the country of the Hadendoa, a tribe of the Bisharein. A Hadendoa seldom scruples to kill his companion on the road in order to possess himself of the most trifling article of value, but a retaliation of blood exists in full force. They are not given to hospitality, as other Arabs are, and they boast of their treachery. On June 6, we came to the district of Taka, fertile and populous owing to the regular inundation of the Atbara and its tributaries. A valley in the eastern mountains is noted for its splendid breed of cattle and fine dhourra. The Bisharein here eat the blood of animals coagulated over the fire, and the liver and kidneys raw.

In an adjoining valley we encountered another tribe of Bisharein called the Hallenga, who draw their origin from Abyssinia. They have a horrible custom in connection with the revenge of blood. When the slayer has been seized by the relatives of the deceased, a family feast is proclaimed, at which the murderer is brought into the midst of them, bound upon an angareyg, and while his throat is slowly cut with a razor, the blood is caught in a bowl and handed round amongst the guests, every one of whom is bound to drink of it at the moment the victim breathes his last.

A stay was made at Filik, the principal town of Taka, till June 15, when the caravan struck N.E. by N., and marched alternately through sandy and fertile country, across mountains of no great height, and plains with herds of ostriches and fine cattle. The low grounds were frequently intersected by the beds of torrential streams. One day, we crossed a rocky plain with the soil strongly impregnated with salt, and pastured by large herds of camels which the Arabs here keep for their milk and flesh alone, seldom using them as beasts of burden.

On June 26 we arrived at El Geyf, an environ of Souakin—the town itself, which consists of 600 houses, being on one of the islands in the bay of Souakin. The inhabitants of Souakin are a motley race, and are governed by the Emir el Hadherebe, a chief of the Bisharein tribe on the neighbouring mainland, who is chosen by the five first families of the tribe, but is nominally dependent upon the pasha of Djidda.

The manners of the people partake of the vices of their neighbours in the desert, and in cruelty surpass them, and the law of the strongest is alone respected. I was ill-treated by the aga, the representative of the Turkish Government, until I produced the firmans which I had concealed in a secret pocket, given me by Mohammed Aly, the viceroy of Egypt, and by Ibrahim Pasha, his son. When the aga saw these with their handsome seals, he regarded me as a great personage; but I refused to take up my abode in his house, which hospitality he offered, and continued to live in the camp of the black merchants on the mainland.

I had intended proceeding to Mokha by ship and then on to Sana, the capital of the Yemen, from which place to make the pilgrimage to Mekka. However, having heard of the war in the Hedjaz in Arabia, I abandoned my project, and sailed from Souakin, on July 6, for Djidda, where I arrived on July 16, and afterwards joined Mohammed Aly.