humanity is found in their
character.

I remained a fortnight in Berber, and on April 7 our caravan, reduced to
two-thirds of its original numbers, set out for Shendy. Three days
afterwards we came to Damer, a town of 500 houses, neat and clean, with
regular tree-shaded streets. The inhabitants are Arabs of the tribe of
Medja-ydin, and the greater part of them are Fokera, or religious men.
They have a pontiff called El Faky El Kebir (the great faky), who is
their chief and judge. In the mosque there is a famous school attended
by young men from Darfour, Sennaar, Kordofan, and other parts of the
Soudan; and the affairs of this little hierarchical state appeared to be
conducted with great prudence. From Damer we passed on to Shendy, where
we arrived on April 18.

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 Cobbe 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