of Khartoum, of Zanzibar and Natal.

On arriving, these "Pagazis" are paid the price agreed upon. It
consists in twenty yards of cotton cloth, or of that stuff which bears
the name of "Merikani," a little powder, a handful of cowry (shells
very common in that country, which serve as money), a few pearls, or
even those of the slaves who would be difficult to sell. The slaves
are paid, when the trader has no other money.

Among the five hundred slaves that the caravan counted, there were
few grown men. That is because, the "Razzia" being finished and
the village set on fire, every native above forty is unmercifully
massacred and hung to a neighboring tree. Only the young adults of
both sexes and the children are intended to furnish the markets.
After these men-hunts, hardly a tenth of the vanquished survive. This
explains the frightful depopulation which changes vast territories of
equatorial Africa into deserts.

Here, the children and the adults were hardly clothed with a rag of
that bark stuff, produced by certain trees, and called "mbouzon" in
the country. Thus the state of this troop of human beings, women
covered with wounds from the "havildars'" whips, children ghastly
and meager, with bleeding feet, whom their mothers tried to carry in
addition to their burdens, young men closely riveted to the fork, more
torturing than the convict's chain, is the most lamentable that can be
imagined.

Yes, the sight of the miserable people, hardly living, whose voices
have no sound, ebony skeletons according to Livingstone's expression,
would touch the hearts of wild beasts. But so much misery did not
touch those hardened Arabs nor those Portuguese, who, according to
Lieutenant Cameron, are still more cruel. This is what Cameron says:
"To obtain these fifty women, of whom Alvez called himself proprietor,
ten villages had been destroyed, ten villages having each from one
hundred to two hundred souls: a total of fifteen hundred inhabitants.
Some had been able to escape, but the greater part--almost all--had
perished in the flames, had been killed in defending their families,
or had died of hunger in the jungle, unless the beasts of prey had
terminated their sufferings more promptly.

"Those crimes, perpetrated in the center of Africa by men who boast of
the name of Christians, and consider themselves Portuguese, would seem
incredible to the inhabitants of civilized countries. It is impossible
that the government of Lisbon kn