A PRAYING COUNTRY. 231 conducive to continued slumber was the creaking of those cumbersome wooden contrivances for lifting Nile water on to the land. In the evening he had been much astonished by being addressed by one of the natives in the village in the words, "Good evenin', sar," and found that the man had been an officer's servant on board a paddle-steamer for nearly six years, and had visited Bombay, Singapore, and China, but had come back to his native village with his savings. According to him the wealthier classes of the population — and he himself, in his native village, was considered a capitalist — viewed the threatened approach of the Mahdi with dread. The radical theories as to distribution of property and so on, preached by the Mahdi, were no more fancied by men of substance in Nubia than they are elsewhere.

Early in the morning throughout the journey, awray on the other side- of the Nile, a red gleam in the sky betokened the approach of dawn. Kneeling on mats on the ground, and with heads turned towards Mecca, the two guides were to be heard repeating their morning prayers, alternately crying out with loud voices and alternately muttering their petitions for a successful day's journey. " The most praying country in the world is this Soudan. Quite independent of the Mahdi's movement, the people everywhere are filled with religious fervour, which, it is easy to understand, with little effort may be turned into fanaticism. In his rigorous observance of the laws of the Koran lies in great part the secret of the mudir's power; and Osman Digma at Suakim, by dressing like a fakir, in a single dirty cotton cloth, and covering himself with dust, and praying continuously, induced the Hadendowas to follow him first to victory and then to their death. In Suakim itself the moolah in the little mosque began to call the people there to prayers at four o'clock every morning. At first the sonorous sound of his deep voice, rising and falling in musical cadence, was pronounced interesting in a high degree; later on we described it as bellowing and a nuisance of the first order."

The second day the camel of one of the guides broke down, and they were obliged, albeit with heavy hearts, to sacrifice sundry little comforts which had been provided for the journey. The