THE EGYPTIAN SUDAN In the early part of the nineteenth century travellers in Nubia and the Sudan became more numerous, and a general opening up of those countries began. Among the first to force a way into Nubia was Mr. Thomas Legh, M.P., of Lyme, Cheshire, who in the winter of 1 812-13 journeyed up the Nile and succeeded in reaching Ibrim, the Primis of classical writers. In the interval which had elapsed since Mr. Browne was turned back at Aswan, the Barabara, or Nubian tribes, had managed to assert their independence of the Turks, and as the power of the Mamluks had been crushed, there was no reason why travellers should not have been allowed to proceed, except the all-sufficient one that the Barabara hated all foreigners and determined to prevent any of them from entering the country. When Vivant Denon, a member of the French expedition to Egypt ordered by Napoleon the Great, attempted even to visit the Island of Philae, the inhabitants utterly refused to allow him to land, and they gave him to understand that if he attempted to do so every day for two months they would not allow it. The day following that on which they had announced this decision, Denon returned with 200 men, and when the natives saw them they assumed an attitude of defence and defied the French savant with loud cries, which the women repeated. The inhabitants of the neighbouring island immediately armed themselves and flocked to the east side of the rock with sabres, muskets, matchlocks, bucklers, and long pikes. Denon assured them that he had no intention of doing them harm, whereupon they declared that they would never let him land, that they were not Mamluks to fly before him, that they wished to tight, that they had defeated both the Mamluks and their neighbours, and that they would resist him. Denon then ordered his sappers to pull down the huts on the mainland, whereupon, posting themselves in the clefts and caves of their rocks, the inhabitants began a brisk and well-directed fire. Soon after this a field-piece was brought up, and as soon as the people of the larger island saw that communication between them and Philae was broken, they drove their cattle across a narrow arm of the Nile and disappeared into the desert. As it was impossible for Denon to complete a ' See Thomas Legh, Narrative of a Journey in Egypt and the Country bevond the Cataracts, London, 410, 1816.

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