386 JOURNEY TO CENTRAL AFRICA.

The goods brought into Central Africa consist principally of English muslins and calicoes, the light red woollen stuffs of Barbary, cutlery, beads and trinkets. Cloths, silks, powder, tobacco, and arakee, are also brought in considerable quantities, while in the large towns there is always a good sale for sugar, rice, coffee and spices. The Turkish officials and the Franks are very fond of the aniseed cordial of Scio, maraschino, rosoglio, and the other Levantine liquors ; and even the heavy, resinous wines of Smyrna and Cyprus find their way here. The natives prefer for clothing the coarse, unbleached cotton stuffs of their own manufacture, one mantle of which is sufficient for years. As may readily be supposed, the market is frequently glutted with goods of this description, whence the large houses often send money from Cairo for the purchase of gum and ivory, in preference to running any risk. At the time of my visit, all sorts of muslins and calicoes might be had in Khartoum at a very slight advance on Cairo prices, and the merchants who were daily arriving with additional bales, complained that the sale would not pay the expenses of their journey. The remarkable success of the caravans of the previous year had brought a crowd of adventurers into the lists, very few of whom realized their expectations. It was the California experience in another form. No passion is half so blind as the greed for gain.

. Khartoum is the great metropolis of all this region. Some few caravans strike directly through the Beyooda Desert, from Dongola to Kordofan, but the great part come directly to the former place, where they dispose of their goods, and then proceed to Kordofan for gum, or wait the return of the yearly expedition up the White Nile, to stock themselves with ivory.