— 14 — to Khartoum with my cousin Mohammed Abd el Rahman, who sold them and returned with more merchandise on the fourteenth of October 1859.

Praise be to God the Omnipotent, the Creator of land and sea.

JOURNEY TO THE NYAM = NYAM* COUNTRY 1859.

"While 1 was in the land of G6I0, I learnt that there was a vast tract of country to the southwest that abounded in buffalo and elephants, which were so many in number that ivory was reckoned of little worth. The Sultan was said to be a just ruler named Tikma, so I packed up my bales and went forth a twenty-five days' journey to the Sultan of the Nyam-Nyams, taking a sumptuous present with me. Now when first we arrived at Dar Tikma, we were amazed to find that his compound was surrounded with a palisade of elephants' tusks, some three or four thousand in number. So we asked permission from the Sultan to trade in his country, and were given leave to do so in the land of the cannibals, the land where there are no graves. But he understood not how it was that we set such store by ivory, and we told him that it was simply in order to convert it into powder : so it * A generic and onomatopoetic name applied to the cannibal tribes in that part of the Sudan.