wanderers to rest at.

English soldiers have often started off running with their empty
water-bottles to fill them in that lake or river. Many, many
travellers have hastened towards it when they knew that they must have
water or die. But ever the mirage, as it is called, retreats before
them. That water is like magic water that no human being can ever
drink. The palaces and towers are like fairy palaces and towers into
which no real person ever enters. The green leaves and white birds,
the trees and the grass, are only a picture that the sun and the desert
make to madden thirst-parched men.

"When Allah made the Soudan," say the Arabs, "he laughed."

European traders were amongst the first to open a way into the Soudan.
The Egyptians knew that there was much fine ivory to be got there, but
were too lazy to try to get it. The Europeans, many of them
Englishmen, braved dangers and hardships, and made much money by the
ivory they bought from the black people of the desert land. Soon they
found there was something else for which they could get much higher
prices than any that they could get for elephants' tusks. They called
it "black ivory." By that they meant slaves.

At once they began to raid, to harry, and to kidnap the black races of
the Soudan. They built forts and garrisoned them with Arabs, to whom
no cruelty was too frightful, no wickedness too great. They burned
down the villages of the blacks. They stole their flocks and herds.
They burned or stole their crops. Their wives and little children they
tore from them, chained them in gangs, and took them across the desert
to sell for slaves. The men whom they could not take they slew.

So great and shameless became this trade, that at last Europe grew
ashamed that any of her people should be guilty of it. There was an
outcry made. The Europeans sold their stations to the Arabs, and
quietly withdrew. The Arabs then agreed to pay a tax to the Egyptian
Government, which saw no harm in stealing people and selling them as
slaves, so long as some of the money thus gained went into the royal
treasury.

And so the slave trade grew and grew, until, in 1874, out of every
hundred people of the land about eighty-four were slaves. The Arabs
trained some of the black boys they caught to be slave-hunters, and
taught them so well that they grew up even more wicked and cruel than
their masters.

Before long the slavers became so powerful and so rich that the