populated.
In a hut might be found a man, his wife and children all lying dead on
their angaribs. Even in the salt districts near Shendi, almost the
entire population had died of hunger. In Kassala and Galabat matters
were even worse; here the price of an ardeb had gone up to two hundred
and fifty dollars, and even for this enormous price it was almost
impossible to get it, for there was really none in the country. The
great Shukrieh tribe had eaten almost all their camels, and its numbers
had dwindled from forty thousand to four thousand souls.

The large tribe of Wad Zayid (the Debaineh) in the neighbourhood of
Gedaref, who for his opposition to Mahdiism had been thrown into prison
in Omdurman, had become almost extinct. The population of Kassala,
Galabat, and Gedaref had dwindled almost to nothing. Zeki Tummal, to
obtain food for his troops, had mercilessly robbed the corn merchants
and compelled them to give up their very last supplies; he left them
without even a handful.

Around Galabat the hyenas became so bold that they would sneak into the
villages almost before the sun was down and drag off the wretched
half-dead people. Out of Zeki's force of eighty-seven thousand souls
before the famine there remained, after it was over, only ten thousand,
including women and children. Karkoj and Sennar, which were generally
called the granaries of the Sudan, were desolated by famine. It was,
indeed, Heaven's terrible retribution on a people who had practised
untold cruelties and shed rivers of innocent blood.

So great was the distress that it became a general saying that any one
who did not die in 1889 would never die; and this year, corresponding to
the year 1306 Moslem era, will remain engraven for ever on the minds of
those who went through the famine in the Sudan and had the good fortune
to survive it.

When the first supplies of the new harvest reached the market, there was
the most heartfelt joy throughout the country, and every one
congratulated his neighbour on the termination of their distress; but
even the new harvest was not good, and dhurra did not go below
twenty-four dollars the ardeb. The locusts did much harm to the harvest,
and this plague has devastated the land now for nearly four years.

There are two sorts of locusts, the yellow and the bright red, and they
have infested the whole country from Kordofan to Dongola and to Tokar.
They came in such swarms that at times the sun was obscured; on one
oc