DONGOLA Isma'il Pasha ; its garrison consisted of from three to eight hundred men. In the bazaar were sold silk, linen, cotton stuffs, tarbushes, shoes, glassware, earthenware, medicines for the eyes, pipes of all sorts and sizes, thread, needles, rock salt, amulets, coffee, sugar, tamarinds, weapons of every kind, ginger and spices of all kinds, seeds possessing certain medicinal properties, oils and pomades of various kinds, scent, &c. Dongola also possessed a flourishing slave market ; this is not to be wondered at when we remember how clo?ely it was connected with Dar Fur and Kordofan, and that main caravan routes ran to both these places and to Sennaar and Eastern Abyssinia. Hoskins tells us (p. 184) that he saw "one extremely beautiful Abyssinian girl" on sale for one hundred and fifty dollars, and that for one who was not beautiful eighty dollars were asked. Business was transacted by barter, but he saw some rudely shaped pieces of iron which he was told were Dar Fur money. In the first quarter of the nineteenth century Dongola was famed, according to Burckhardt,! for a breed of horses, of Arabian origin, of great strength and beaut3% and with all four legs white as far as the knees. A prime stallion was worth from five to ten slaves. Burckhardt also mentions that there were no elephants in Dongola in his day, but says that the hippopotamus (called barnik, or faras al-bahr, i.e., river-horse) was very common in the river. In 1813 there were three in the Nile between the second and Third Cataracts, and in 1812 one was seen so far north as Daraw, " one day's march north of that place" (i e., Aswan). The reputation of the men of Dongola is not high among certain Sudani folk, for they have a proverb to the effect that a " man of Dongola is a devil in the skin of a man."

For some time after the beginning of the Mahdi's rebellion, the people of the Dongola province refused to join him, but eventually they were forced to do so, and though they afforded him great assistance, they were very glad when General Kitchener freed them from his rule. After the bombardment of Hafir, which has been mentioned above, the gunboats steamed up the river, and began to fire on the fortifications of Dongola, and on the huge Dervish camp which was at the back of the town. A " Travels in Nubia,'' p. 66.

105