ATBARA before the bed of the railway could be made were considerable. The urgent need for economy developed their inventive faculties to a wonderful degree, and their ingenious makeshifts and contrivances were singularly successful. In the course of the morning the captain of the Burden reported that the steamer was loaded with wood and ready to start, and, as there was no possibility that year of visiting the ancient sites in the southern portion of the Island of Meroe, I left my kind friends and returned to the Atbara. The train for Haifa had left about half an hour before I arrived, and as there would not be another for two days I had plenty of time to look about the camp, and watch other people work. Almost the first person I met was a young Egyptian whom I had known as a boy in the school of the American Mission at Cairo. He spoke English very well, and had been helped by the Mission into the Government engineering works in Cairo, where he stayed for some years and learned his trade, and he was then employed in connection with locomotives at Atbara. He was one of the many young men who have been educated by the American Mission, and made good and useful members of society. The Post and Telegraph Office was an interesting place, and the number of natives who frequented it was surprising.

Natives of various towns and villages in Egypt were continually telegraphing to their relations to say that they were well, and the business done in money orders was, comparatively, large.

Wandering one morning by invitation into the Commandant's office, I was the witness of an interesting ceremony, namely, the setting free of some slaves. The British authorities had, it seemed, for some time past, suspected certain natives of Berber of carrying on, though on a much reduced scale, their old traffic in slaves. These men had their agents posted at different points on the various caravan roads in the desert, and from time to time they were able to seize small companies of travellers, and stray wayfarers, and carr}' them off across the desert to the sea-coast near Sawakin, where they managed to export them. When British officers began to open up the old trade routes in the Eastern Desert, and to establish patrols under Egyptian officers, the Berber merchants found such proceedings highly inconvenient, and as British officers could not be bribed, they were placed 281