368 JOURNEY TO CENTRAL AFRICA. .

Arab tribes. The tent was in charge of the shekh's niece, a handsome girl of about eighteen, and an old woman with three children, the youngest of which was suckled by a black slave.

He was an ebony Cupid of a year old, rejoicing in the bunches of white shells that hung from his neck, wrists and ankles.

He exhibited a curiosity to touch me, and I took him in my arms and addressed him in Christian nursery tongue. The sound of my voice, however, was more horrible than the color of my skin. He set up a yell and kicked out his little black, satin-skinned legs till I was obliged to hand him over to the slave nurse.

From the bank on which the village is built, I could see beyond the trees of the opposite shore, a wide stretch of the plains of Kordofan — a level savanna of yellow grass, extending without a break to the horizon. During the afternoon, while the men were resting from their rowing, Bahr, the Dinka cook, got into a dispute with one of them, and finally worked herself into such a rage that she jumped overboard with the intention of drowning herself, and would have done so, had not one of the sailors plunged after her and hauled her ashore, in spite of her violent struggles and endeavors to thrust her head under water. When she found she could not indulge in this recreation, she sat down on the ground, burst into a paroxysm of angry tears, and in a quarter of an hour went back to grind her dourra, in the best possible humor. Her name, Bahr, signifies " the sea," but she was an Undine of the Black Sea, and the White Nile refused to receive her.

We went gloriously down stream that evening, with a light west wind filling the little sail and the men at their oars, singing shrill choruses in the Congolese and Djaaleyn dialects-