A WORTHLESS GOVERNOR. 413 Defa’allah’s slaves were subsequently confiscated, twenty-seven were found to belong to Abd-es-Sadik.

In explanation of the phrase that “he had assigned a village to him,” it may be as well to remark that all the officials here had a number of male slaves, whom they armed—of course with arms and ammunition belonging to the Government. These fellows then settled down in the native villages, and compelled the inhabitants by force of arms to contribute all sorts of produce, which they partly used for their own support, but sent most of it to their masters’ houses. Yusuff Pasha Hassan, Hassan Bey Ibrahim, Mula Effendi, and the rest of these petty Satraps have thus kept up dozens of these robbers’ nests here, concealed by the prestige of their names. Other armed slaves went about the country, hunting up slaves for their masters. ‘That all these slaves carried on slave-hunting on their own account need scarcely be mentioned.

My stay at Ayak lasted a long time, since Mula Effendi, the chief of the whole district of Rol, naturally showed no inclination to proceed against his accomplices. He had, indeed, himself at Ayak a branch establishment of his chief house at Rumbek, with fifty to sixty inmates.

Rumbek is not far from Ayak, so that the people there had had time to send away any slaves from whom gossip or complaints were apprehended, and even in some cases to send them free to their homes. If the number of such was four hundred in Ayak, it was here from six hundred to seven hundred, while the total number of slaves in Rumbek before my arrival was reckoned by the people themselves at over three thousand. The station was a fearful place, as bad as brandy, syphilis, the slave-trade, and debauchery of every sort could make it. Happily, my order that every man should now pay regular taxes and officially announce the number of his slaves had done away with the desire to stay among the scum of Khartum which had collected here, and I was glad enough to dismiss all this rabble to Khartim, and to permit them to retreat to the Bahr-el-Ghazal, where the Danagla régime flourishes as it did before Gessi’s time. The morning after my arrival one hundred and sixty-five Monbuttu slaves of both ‘sexes (among them a number of children of five to six), who