TRANSLATOR'S PREFACE.

Ignatius Pallme, a Bohemian by birth, it would appear, undertook the journey to Kordofan, on commission, for a mercantile establishment at Cairo, in the hope of discovering new channels of traffic with Central Africa. In the pursuit of his object, he sojourned longer in the country than any European before him ; the information he furnishes respecting the present state of this province of Egypt in particular, and of the Belled Soudan in general, may, therefore, be considered the most authentic in existence at the present time. That few travellers have visited these countries, and subjected the information they were enabled to collect to print, may be deduced from the facts, that scarcely onehalf of the places mentioned in the work before us are to be found on the most recent maps ; and that in referring to the literature on these countries, for making a comparison between Pallme's opinions