THE CITY AND POPULATION. 277 when complete, will be surrounded by other offices of government. For Soudan, it is a building of some pretension, and the Pasha took great pride in exhibiting it. He told me that the Arab shekhs who visited him would not believe that it was the work of man alone. Allah must have helped him to raise such a wonderful structure. It has an inclosed arched corridor in front, in the Italian style, and a square tower over the entrance. At the time of my visit Abdallah Effendi was building a very handsome two-story house of burnt brick, and the Catholic priests intended erecting another, as soon as they should have established themselves permanently. "Within a few months, large additions had been made to the bazaar, while the houses of the slaves, on the outskirts of the city, were constantly springing up like ant-hills.

There is no plan whatever in the disposition of the buildings. Each man surrounds his property with a mud wall, regardless of its location with respect to others, and in going from one point to another, one is obliged to make the most perplexing zigzags. I rarely ventured far on foot, as I soon became bewildered in the labyrinth of blank walls. When mounted on the Consul's tallest dromedary, I looked down on the roofs of the native houses, and could take my bearings without difficulty. All the mysteries of the lower life of Khartoum were revealed to me, from such a lofty post. On each side I looked into pent yards where the miserable Arab and Negro families lazily basked in the sun during the day, 01 into the filthy nests where they crawled at night. The swarms of children which they bred in those dens sat naked in the dust, playing with vile yellow dogs, and sometimes a lean burden camel stood in the corner. The only furniture to be seen