226 JOURNEY TO CENTRAL AFRICA.

Koreish, of Yemen, are still to be found in the country of the Atbara, and there are those in Ethiopia, who claim to be descendants from the line of the Abbasides and the Ommiades.

There has been very little intermixture •with the negro races beyond Sennaar, who are looked upon as little better than wild beasts. The Arabic language is spoken from the Bed Sea to the borders of Bar-Fur and Bomou, and according to Burckhardt, the prevalent idioms are those of Hedjaz, in Arabia.

The distinction between the descendants of the ojd Arab stock, and those who, like the Ababdehs and Bisharees, belong to the native African races, is obvious to the most careless observer.

The latter, however, must not be confounded with the Negro race, from which they differ still more widely.

Bai's Bakhid had with him a son named Ibrahim — a bo\ of twelve. His head was shaven so as to leave a circular tuft of hair on the crown ; large silver rings hung from his ears, and each cheek was adorned with four broad sears — three horizontal, and one vertical, — which were produced by gashing the skin with a knife, and then raising the flesh so as to prevent the edges from uniting. All the Nubian tribes are scarred in the same way, frequently upon the breast and back as well as the face, and the number and position of the marks is generally a token of the particular tribe to which the person belongs. The slaves brought from the mountains of Fazogl, on the Abyssinian frontier, have a still greater profusion of these barbaric ornaments. I had another Mahassee on board — a fellow of five and twenty, named Beshir, who kept all the others in a continual laugh with his droll sayings. He spoke the dialect of his tribe, not a word of which I could understand, but his face and voice were so comical, that I laughed involuntarily,