THE EGYPTIAN SUDAN worked at his sketch, and in about an hour had made an excellent portrait of the negress and her finery. The natives who crowded round the court were much interested as they saw the picture growing under his skilful fingers, but the woman herself was afraid that his possession of her likeness would put her in his power. When the drawing was ended Mr. Maud gave her two twenty-piastre pieces (about eight shillings), which was double what the shekh suggested, but she took them unthankfully and walked away saying, 'Galtl, galtl,'" i.e. "Little, little." With the arrival of the Anglo-Egyptian army at Merawi in 1896 a new era of prosperity dawned for the natives there, and one of the strongest evidences of this was the improvement in the quantity and quality of the apparel worn by both men and women, and especially in the number of ornaments worn by the latter. In the wake of the army followed the enterprising Greek, and employment for the native, who was well paid both for his work and for the things which he supplied to the troops, such as dates and dhurra. The regular employment of the men brought a steady flow of money into the villages, and before I left Gebel Barkal there was a sufficient demand for cotton goods, ironware, crockery, &c , to make it worth the while of the merchants to reopen on one day each week the market, which had been discontinued during the Dervish rebellion. For some time past the villagers of Merawi, Shibba, and Barkal had been obliged to make their purchases at Tankasi, seven miles down the river, but times were so much changed that the merchants of Tankasi now came up to Barkal, and did a considerable amount of business.

A Sudan market is an interesting sight, and there is nothing like it anywhere else known to me, except, perhaps, the bridge at Stambiil, and the camel-market at Sukhna, between Tudmur and the Euphrates. The people alone afford a fine subject for study, and the variety of faces and types of countenance seem endless. At Tankasi we saw Gaalin Arabs from the Western Desert, men partly Arab and partly Negro, DongohWis, men of the Shaikiya tribe, dwellers in the deserts to the west of the Fourth Cataract, full-blooded Negroes, a few Abyssinians, and many other kinds of men too numerous to mention. The apparel of nearly every man showed some slight 216 i