496 LETTERS TO DR. SCHWEINFURTH.

our own strength without any supplies from Khartum, and not only did I spare the Government expense at this time, but also proved practically that the province could, under our honest administration, yield a surplus, after providing for its own expenses. I began to plant rice and sugar, to set in order the administration, and to extend the boundaries of the province. Yet who has given me even a good word? Passons la-dessus! The late Sirdar Ekrem Omar Pasha once said to me that in the East one must have powerful patrons, plenty cf money, or a pretty wife, in order to obtain acknowledgment of one’s services. Can he have been right? _ Sir John Kirk has written me a very kind letter, and I am indeed deeply grateful to him. He has moved heaven and earth to assist me, has induced the Sultan of Zanzibar to write letters to the King of Uganda and the Arab merchants, commending me to their care, and has certainly done for me more than his duty demanded. As to the letters from the missionaries to Junker, I have only to say that they were private letters: there was a note for me on the margin of Kirk’s letter, telling me not to retreat hastily, and that they would try to write to me. You can easily conceive with what interest I ran over the despatches, if you call to mind that» the last news from Hurope—in a letter from Dr. Hartlaub— reached me in the beginning of January, and the last from Khartuim in the beginning of February 1883, that is, exactly three years ago. So now I had the whole of the sad drama before me, which ended in Gordon’s death, the retreat of the English, and the loss of the Sudan, and it came back to my mind most vividly how the editor of the Zimes had remarked in a note to a communication from me that I took too gloomy a view of the situation; for [ had warned the English not to think too lightly of the state of affairs in the Sudan, and not to let themselves be deceived by an illusory religious movement when very different objects were really aimed at. .Poor Gordon! I see in the despatch that he was killed by a volley on the way to the Austrian Consulate; and so Hansal also—the: brave Hansal—is probably numbered among the victims of these unfortunate events. Besides the occurrences in the Sudan, I find allusions to colonies started by the Germans in the west