— 99 — wretched people, powerless to combine against the hated trader, were plundered and murdered until vast tracts of country became devasted and depopulated.

' From white ivory to black was but a step : the latter was employed to carry the former, and what more simple than that at the end of a long journey, far from kith and kin, far from help and friendly assistance, a stranger in a strange land, he should be sold to provide a yet further profit ? Unrelenting as the desert from which they came, pitiless as the fever-haunted country to which they went, the Khartoumers, as they were afterwards called, scourged the land of the blacks, until all honest trade and peaceful cultivation was abandoned and all friendly intercourse was at an end.

But, if the method of trading was simple, the way in which the traders hoodwinked the Turkish Officials was not a whit less simple, and consisted merely in bribing, with a gift of slaves, any employee who was in any way brought into contact with the slave driver.

Zubeir in particular knew well how to propitiate the Mammon of unrighteousness, and to play upon the sensitive nerves of those whose co-operation he desired.(i) To a certain Elletofoni, a mere messenger (l) Zubeir himself admits he never had any trouble about procuring rifles. "Do men sleep", he asks "when there is money to be made ? "