10

of the equator into one great province, and to place it under you as Governor-General." "It is a great command," says Gordon, "for the province is 1,640 miles in length, and of an average breadth of about 660 miles-larger than the British Isles, Portugal, Spain, France, Belgium, Holland, Germany, and Austria taken together." The outline which we give from Colonel Gordon's own sketch will best show its configuration.

This great territory has only come under the rule of Egypt within recent times, and by repeated and gradual annexations. A portion was conquered in 1821-22 by Ismail Pasha, son of

massive ramparts of stone, or at times stretches over bare and sandy wastes. Of this sterile country and its wretched inhabitants Colonel Gordon thus wrote: "I expect to do very very little to ameliorate these countries. They are too vast, and no one could supervise them properly. The whole way we go we are accompanied by people who cry out, 'We are miserable.' Of the Berberans, on the other hand, Gordon writes that they are "active, handy fellows, the remnant of an ancient race." To the south lies the central province of Khartoum, with the town of that name, 1,300 feet above the sea, and containing a most

SUA KIM

40

NGOLA

N

Berber

Su akim

Khartoum

KHARTOUM

Kassala

MASSOWAH

Jeddah

Massowa

Месса

Kolkol

•Fascher

DARFOUR

El Obeid KORDOFAN

Azulla

VINISSA

ABY:

40

Magdala

Aden

50

Berberah

Harare

50

INDIAN OCE

20

30

Mehemet Ali, but this conquest did not reach farther south than Khartoum. The late Khedive extended his rule far to the south, and his government was carried, first by Sir Samuel Baker, and then by Colonel Gordon, as far as the Albert Nyanza. Recent events have, however, shown that Egypt has but a very slender hold on the great southern provinces.

The most northerly portion, stretching from 30° long. to the Red Sea, is divided into Dongola, Berber, and Suakin. Dongola, the westernmost, is mainly composed of the great Nubian desert, which for centuries lay like a dividing ocean between Egypt and the Soudan. Throughout this district for a space of about 250 miles the navigation of the Nile is blocked by formidable beds of rocks, and the only practicable route for camels winds through desolate gorges, walled in by

From Colonel Gordon's Sketch Map.

heterogeneous population, variously estimated at from fifty to one hundred thousand. This large place, situated on a fork between the Blue and White Nile, is the capital of the Egyptian Soudan, and the seat of government. Its possession is of the highest importance to Egypt.

West of Khartoum lie the provinces of Kordofan and Darfour. (Earl Dufferin, in the despatch just laid before Parliament, suggests that it would be "wise on the part of Egypt to abandon these provinces.") The first and smaller of these has been under the sway of Egypt since it was conquered by Mehemet Ali in 1821. Its capital is El-Obeid, a large town with from thirty to forty thousand inhabitants, standing in the midst of a vast flat, smooth plain. This is far from the Nile. Colonel Gordon's description shows that it cannot be a very pleasant country. "Our road is through

the jungle, and your path is overhung with the prickly boughs of trees, through which your camel will drag you if you do not look out. He sees he can get through, and does not care how you get served. The air is like a furnace, and every one is filthy from want of water."*

El-Óbeid was recently besieged and captured by the Mahdi, or False Prophet. Much has been heard lately of this mysterious personage, who is variously designated the Mahdi, Mehdi, or Muhdi. His career is full of romantic adventure since the time when Gessi imprisoned him for five months in the town of Chakka, whence he escaped to establish himself as a religious teacher on one of the rocky islets in the Nile to the south of Khartoum. After a time followers flocked to his standard, and he has now succeeded in placing himself at the head of an army so large that it is not at all certain that Egypt will be able, unaided, to prevent him from wresting the entire Soudan from her grasp. M. Vossion, late consul for France at Khartoum, tells us that the Mahdi signs all his orders La illah illalah, Mohammed-AhmedAbdoulla, which means, there is no God but Allah, and Mohammed-Ahmed is his envoy (prophet). The fanatical inhabitants are persuaded he is the true Saviour (Messiah) promised to Islam,† and entrusted with a supernatural mission for the establishment of a purified Mohammedanism.

Mr.

We now come to Darfour, the westernmost province of the Egyptian Soudan, and perhaps the most interesting of all on account of the melancholy fate of its unfortunate inhabitants. Felkin, who has lately returned through this district on his way home from King M'tesa's court, tells us that the upper third of the Soudan is almost entirely peopled with Arab tribes who have inhabited the country for ages, whilst the lower two-thirds, extending almost to the equator, are peopled with blacks. The consequence of this state of things may easily be imagined. The Arab tribes are and always have been slavedealers, and the provinces of the Soudanese blacks have been the great man-hunting grounds from which have been drawn the countless thousands of miserable victims destined to supply the slave-markets of Egypt, Turkey, Arabia, and Persia. Darfour, one of the latest conquered of the provinces of the Soudan, has suffered almost more than any of the others. Colonel Gordon tells us that "two-thirds of its inhabitants

have been taken into slavery." Mr. Felkin says

that he "could trace the route of the slave caravans for hundreds of miles by the bleached bones that strewed their path." He tells us also that "the whole territory south of latitude 15° is now one vast slave-hunting ground, and, with the exception of the equatorial provinces under the rule of Dr. Emin Bey (an Austrian), where there is neither slavery nor the slave-trade, is overrun by slave-dealers. As a consequence, the population is decreasing to a lamentable extent, for where Petherick and Schweinfurth saw a teeming population, Mr. Wilson and I have walked for days

"Colonel Gordon in Central Africa." De La Rue, 1881. "Khartoum et la Soudan, d'Egypte." Par M. Vossion. La Nouvelle Revue, March, 1883.

without meeting a single human being, and the only signs that it once possessed inhabitants were the ruins of sacked towns and villages and the white bones of those who had fought for their hearths and homes."*

The equatorial province, close to Lake Albert Nyanza, is famous as the scene of Sir Samuel Baker's exploits when he and his Forty Thieves had to cut their way through the dense masses of troops belonging to King Kaba Rega.

Gordon Pasha reduced this province to order, and it has since been administered by Emin Bey. It is refreshing to see, amidst the turmoil and anarchy which have desolated the Soudan, how one upright and energetic European governor has been able to introduce order and prosperity into this southernmost dependence of Egypt, lying almost upon the equator. Mr. Felkin states, in a paper read in February last before the Society of Arts, that at this moment, in Dr. Emin Bey's province, "Crime is unknown, slavery does not exist, the people live at peace with each other, and were it not for the wild animals, one could walk over the entire province with only a walkingstick." What a contrast to the upper provinces of the Soudan, where natives, and not Europeans, are in command!

Up to the year 1874 Darfour was governed by an absolute sovereign descended from a line of kings that had ruled for four hundred years over a country twice as large as England. In the autumn of that year it was conquered by an adventurer from Khartoum who had settled in the adjacent country, and had become the most powerful and audacious of all the slave-dealing chieftains who are the scourge of Central Africa. This man, whose name was Seebehr, and whom the Khedive made a pasha, was the originator of the revolt in the Soudan. He subsequently went to Cairo, and his son Suleiman, and forty of his sandjacks, carried on the rebellion. Suleiman was defeated, and shot by Gessi Pasha, and only three of these sandjacks escaped. According to some accounts, one of these men is the Mahdi, or False Prophet, spoken of above.

Mr. Felkin has given a vivid description of a slave-hunt, or razzia, which we may briefly summarise. It is full of horrors, but we can truly say that the half is not told, for Mr. Felkin has given us vivâ voce descriptions of barbarities which are daily enacted in these blood-stained regions that are too horrible to record on paper.

It must not be supposed that the Arabs do all the fighting or perform all the atrocities of which the conquered people are the victims. There are various tribes of black men, specially the cannibal Niam-Niams so graphically described by Dr. Schweinfurth, who are even more fiendlike than the Arabs. Moreover the slave-hunters' armies are composed of slaves who are often more ferocious than their captors. When a party of slave-hunters wish to make a raid, they visit some friendly chief, and by presents and promises cajole him to assist them in their terrible work. They then

* "Uganda and the Egyptian Soudan." By Wilson and Felkin. Sampson Low and Co., 1882.

join forces and prepare to attack some neighbouring tribe, whose cattle are to be given to the black and friendly allies, whilst the Arabs carry off the human spoil. Then in the early morning, before the sun has risen, the combined forces steal upon their sleeping and unsuspecting victims. Some of the huts and houses are first fired, and then in the confusion which ensues the men capable of bearing arms are shot down, the old of both sexes are butchered with every refinement of cruelty, and all the young men, young women, and children are chained and yoked together to be driven off and sold as slaves. In the long and painful march fresh horrors are of hourly and daily occurrence. Those who fall out of the line and can no longer drag the heavy and ponderous sheebah, or wooden yoke, are murdered in cold blood or left to perish of hunger. Women who are nursing have their babes dashed against a stone before their eyes, as it is known they could not carry their burden for many days. In order to strike terror into a tribe it is a common practice to seize the headmen, and after burying them up to their necks with their faces towards the fierce African sun, to cut off their eyelids, and leave them to die in torments. Mr. Felkin states that this was actually done to three headmen at the Egyptian station of Madi just before he arrived there.

It was mainly with a view to put down these horrors that Colonel Gordon accepted the government of the Soudan in February, 1874. The story of his life during the five years that he spent fighting almost single-handed against the thousands of slave-dealers who were depopulating Central Africa, has been told in his own simple and graphic language. It is probably one of the most melancholy histories that have ever been penned. Saddest of all, perhaps, is it to read: "I returned with the sad conviction that no good could be done in those parts, and that it would have been better if no expedition had ever been sent."

When Gordon started on his crusade he found that the power of Egypt south of Khartoum was almost nil. Only three stations were held by Egyptian troops, and it required a strong force to convey stores, or even letters, from one post to the other. In little more than a year a chain of posts was established, stretching from Khartoum to the Albert Nyanza, and a fifty-ton steamer was put upon the lake. The Governor-General was almost ubiquitous, as may be judged from the fact that in the three years-1877, '78, '79-he rode 8,490 miles on camels and mules over the deserts, besides his long voyages on the Nile. This too in a country where the climate was so deadly to Europeans that almost every one who came out to him either died or was invalided home. His German servant deserted him, at which he expressed his satisfaction in the following quaint terms: "He has got so frightened that he is going back. So much the better! The best servant I ever had is myself-he always does what I like." It was this habit of doing everything for himself that enabled him to do so much, but it was a source of never-ending astonishment to the natives. They could not understand a pasha who cleaned his own gun, and who waded in the river

to draw his own boat, regardless of crocodiles or of sunstroke!

It would be useless to try to enumerate how many thousands of slaves were liberated by Colonel Gordon and his brave lieutenant, Gessi Pasha. The difficulty of providing for them was an everincreasing one, as often the poor creatures were far from their homes and could speak no language intelligible to any one near them.

We have spoken thus fully of the slave-trade, because that is the great trade which is carried on in the Soudan; but it must not be supposed that there is no field there for legitimate commerce. The contrary is the fact; for although Colonel Gordon proved incontestably that the Soudan provinces cost Egypt a yearly sum of more than £100,000, yet we have his testimony that were it not for the devastations caused by the slave-trade a large surplus might be easily obtained from that country. We have also the statements of Gessi Pasha, Dr. Schweinfurth, Dr. Emin Bey, Mr. Felkin, and others, that many portions of the Soudan are remarkably fertile, and that they would produce in large quantities ivory, indiarubber, wax, tamarinds, gum-arabic, vegetable butter, and other articles. But the whole district is blighted by the curse of man-stealing, and until that is stayed there will be ruin and chaos.

In February, 1881, a few months before his lamented death, Gessi Pasha thus wrote to Colonel Gordon: "I had turned the country of the BahrGazelle into a garden. The people were all with me, and so I had been able to discharge a number of my soldiers. My strength lay, not in brutal force, but in the love of the chieftains and their followers. From all sides ivory, caoutchouc, and other products were brought in, and a just Government had done what seven-and-twenty thousand muskets had never been able to do-it had increased the revenue by tenfold." But this bright picture was soon spoiled. Raouf Pasha, Gordon's successor, made Gessi's position intolerable. He cut off two years' pay due to his soldiers, and all the Government servants in that province, and by another stroke of the pen he reduced Gessi's powers and the extent of his territory. Nothing was left for him but to retire, and in a fatal hour he embarked in the wretched steamer which the governor had sent up. He was caught as in a trap by the grassy barrier of the Nile called the Sudd, and here he was shut up with about six hundred followers as in a living grave. Of this number only one hundred "skeletons" were rescued and brought to Khartoum; and the brave hunter of slave-hunters having, shortly afterwards, for ever disappeared from the scene, anarchy, bloodshed, and unspeakable cruelties once more desolate the fair provinces of the Soudan.

There can be no doubt that the only way permanently to benefit the Soudan and to develop its magnificent resources will be by placing it in nearer communication with Egypt and the outer world. The best mode of doing this would appear to be by making a railroad from Suakin, on the Red Sea, to Berber, on the Nile, so strongly recommended by Mr. Felkin, in his valuable paper on Egypt, Present and to Come," read a few months

ago before the Society of Arts, and supported by many other distinguished African travellers. This plan has lately received the unqualified approval of the Earl of Dufferin, in his despatch to Earl Granville (vide Blue Book, Egypt, No. 6, 1883, page 70), and ought certainly to be carried out. It would reduce the journey from the Red Sea to the Nile to sixteen hours by rail, instead of, as at present, a wearisome and dangerous camel ride of fourteen days. Lord Dufferin states that, in his opinion, the provinces of the Soudan, instead of being a drain upon Egypt, would then become a source of wealth.

The question will be asked, What can now be done to stay this horrible slave-trade plague? Our answer is, as it has always been, "Stop the demand." When Turkey and Egypt no more require slaves for their harems and for the army, the slave-dealers will find their trade unprofitable, and the slave-hunts will gradually cease. Let the legal status of slavery be abolished, and there will then be some hope for the future. The most simple method of doing this would appear to

be the one so successfully practised by the English in India, viz., to give the slave equal rights with the freeman. By this means, in the course of a generation, eight millions of slaves have been set free in India without any edict of emancipation, and with no disturbance of the social system. Let the same plan be tried in Egypt, as recommended to the British Government by a deputation from the Anti-Slavery Society in June, 1880, and now endorsed by the high authority of Sir Bartle Frere ;* only, the courts before which the slaves could claim their rights must have a European and not a native judge, otherwise the boon would be valueless. We should prefer this plan to that lately suggested by Lord Dufferin, viz., a process of gradual emancipation in seven years. There are many objections to this method, as was found to our cost under the apprenticeship system in the West Indies. In any case the voice of England should now be able to stop the river of blood which Baker, Gordon, Gessi, and Emin Bey could only temporarily assuage.

Fortnightly Review," February, 1883.

excessively prolonged, so that the articulating angle is carried far back, at a distance from the end of the snout equalling three or four times the length of the head. This suspensorium seems to consist of two osseous portions, analogous to the temporal and the tympano-jugal bones, while a long, slim, styloid process takes the place of the maxillary or intermaxillary bone. At the extremity of the mandible are two hooked teeth, and imperfectly developed dental protuberances mark the surface of the jaws.

By the arrangement of the osseous frame the mouth attains a prodigious development compared with the size of the animal, the upper jaw being joined to the side of the head and the upper part of the body by a fibrous membrane, capable of great distension, like the pocket of the pelican. The distended mouth gives to the animal the appearance of a large funnel, of which the body of the fish presents the aspect of a prolonged pipe. In this pouch the food can be stored, and perhaps partially digested, as in some other fish, such as the Chiasmodus niger.

The locomotive organs are very rudimentary. There are two small appendages answering to fins, placed so near the head and the bronchial apertures as to allow them to be called pectoral fins; ventral fins are wanting. A small dorsal fin reaches from the neck to near the end of the back, and an anal fin reaches from the anal orifice to about the same distance as the extremity of the dorsal fin. A small membranous fold is in the place of what appears a rudimentary tail. The rays, or spines, of the fins are not articulated, nor do they appear to be united by a membrane.

The respiratory apparatus is of a structure unique among osseous fishes. There are six pairs of bronchial vents, or clefts, and consequently six bronchiæ. These are formed each of a double series of laminæ, or membranous plates. The water issues on either side from a minute orifice, a simple cutaneous perforation. There is neither

a hyoid nor opercular cartilage. In the abdominal region the most noticeable point is the entire absence of a swimming bladder.

As to the place to be occupied in ichthyology, it is difficult to judge in the absence of more complete investigation, especially of the skeleton, there being only a single specimen. It has some relation to the Anacanthini, also with certain Physostomi, such as the Scopelida, the Stomiatida, and with the Apoda. While they approach the latter by the absence of ventral fins and the imperfect opercular apparatus, it differs too much by its intermaxillaries, well developed and wholly free, to allow it to be placed in that group. As regards the Scopelida and the Stomiatide, all the genera known of these families have a bronchial orifice widely open; in the former the intermaxillary forms alone the free border of the upper jaw; in the latter the maxillary forms part of the border, so that the pelican fish should rather approach the Scopelida, as it does not possess a trace of the hyoidean fringe, hitherto accepted as characteristic of the Stomiatida. However, it is to the Malacosteus niger, placed among the Stomiatida by zoologists, that the present species seems most closely allied. They alone have the arrangement of the suspensorium indicated above. Apart from this feature, the general structure would rather determine an alliance to the Anacanthini, both in respect to the form of the body, much resembling a Macrurus, and the absence of ventral fins, as in various animals of that group. There are affinities also to the Ophidida and to the Lycodide, the latter with similar marked constriction of the bronchial aperture.

But, on the whole, the characters of the Eurypharynx (wide-throated pelican fish) are SO divided, and touch so many other groups, that for the present it is to be regarded as the type of a new genus or family of marine animals quite separate, except the Malacosteus is to be grouped along with it.

TWO

WO small cottages stood side by side at the western edge of a wide moor in Lanarkshire. It looked a dreary spot, although the tiny dwellings were snug and neat, with their thatched roofs in good repair, and the whitewashed walls overcrept by a couple of elderly honeysuckles, which might have served to point a moral, inasmuch as the longer they lived the sweeter scented they appeared to grow.

From these humble abodes a boy and girl took their daily way to the parish school. Their names were Jamie Gilmore and Nancy Rose, their ages

eleven and nine respectively. In one of the cottages lived an old woman, the grandmother of Nancy, the orphan daughter of her only son. In the other Jamie's parents resided, with what, in local parlance, was termed their "large small family."

Like the youthful Dante and his next-door playmate, Beatrice, Jamie Gilmore and Nancy Rose had always been close allies. On their way to school he would lift her across swollen brooks, and carry her home on his back when the return journey of two miles and a "bittock" seemed rather much for her strength.