THE 8-LAVE BAKHITA. 227 whenever lie spoke. He was a graceless fellow, given to all sorts of debauchery, and was never so happy as when he could drink his fill of om hilbil, (the " mother of nightingales,") as the beer of the country is called, because he who drinks it, sings.

Another curious character was an old woman named Bakhita, a slave of the owner of the vessel, who acted as cook for the sailors. She sat squatted on the forward deck all day hideously and nakedly ugly, but performed her duties so regu larly and with such a contented face, laughing heartily at all the jokes which the men made at her expense, that I soon learned to tolerate her presence, which was at first disgusting. She was a native of the mountains of Dar-Fur, but had been captured by the slave-hunters when a child. She was in Shendy on the night when Ismail Pasha and his soldiers were burned to death by Mek Nemr, in the year 1822. But with all my questioning, she could give no account of the scene, and it was a marvel that she remembered it at all. Life was to her a blank page, and what one day might write upon it, the next day erased. She sat from morning till night, grinding the dourra between two flat stones, precisely as the Mexican women grind their maize, occasionally rubbing her hands upon her woolly head to rid them of the paste. Her only trouble was my white sheep, which, in its search after food, would deliberately seize her mealy top-knots and begin to chew them. Her yells, at such times, were the signal for a fresh attack of Beshir's drollery. Yet old, and ugly, and imbruted as she was, no Frankisk belle, whose bloom is beginning to wane; could have been more sensitive about her age. I was delighted to find this touch of vanity in her ; it was the only trace of feminine