TRAVELS OF BROWNE IN DAR FUR obtained permission to travel from the authorities, and he went to the kingdom of Wadai for a year. "When he had been in the Sudan ten years he returned to Tunis, and later, in 1832, he visited Cairo, where he was given an important post in the Ministry of Public Instruction, and where he first met Dr. Perron, who translated the account of his travels in Dkx Fur into French.

His narrative forms a complete autobiograph}', nnd at all points where his assertions can be tested they have been found correct. He writes, of course, from memory, and from an Oriental point of view, and accurate geographical details are not to be expected from him. His style is easy, and his descriptions of Sudan manners and customs reveal the fact that he possessed the faculty of shrewd and penetrating observation, together with the power of seizing in his mind and expressing in words the salient features of all that he saw and heard.

One of the most interesting features of his narrative is the light which he unconsciously casts upon the abominable traffic in men which went on merrily during his visit to Dar Fur. He depicts in broad outlines the conditions under which the black tribes lived in the great forests that formed a belt right across Africa, and shows that the slave trade flourished in them because there was no other business to occupy men's minds. His own co-religionists, the Muhammadans, who had settled to the north of these forests, drew their supplies of living merchandise from them, and, possessing considerable skill and business capacity, formed slave caravans which they drove mercilessly across deserts for two whole months before they reached northern Egypt. The king of Dar Fur would never allow the Nile to be used as a route, for he feared that such a concession to the merchants would bring in its train an invasion of Egyptians led by Turks ; he only admitted into his kingdom such merchants as had travelled by the desert route, via the Oasis of Selima, for thus the risk of invasion and conquest of his country was reduced to a minimum. Men who had passed sixty or seventy days in marching over the sandy deserts, which lay between Asyut and his frontier towns, would be ill-fitted to undertake the fierce fighting which would follow any attempt to take the country, or in fact to overcome any armed opposition.

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