VIU Preface.

exploration in which Dr. P. Matteucci took part, and Gessi again set out for Khartoum, from wlience he made his way to Fadasi on the borders of the Gralla country.

The aim of this expedition was the liberation of Captain Cecchi, a prisoner of the Queen of Ghera. But difficulties of all kinds and insufficient means obliged the two Italian travellers to return. Gessi, however, was not the man to abandon an undertaking at the first check, and he set himself at once to prepare a second expedition with the same object but by another route, ascending the Sobat river.

" All was ready to start," our friend wrote, " when an official from the Upper Nile brought the news of the revolution of Suleiman Ziber Bey, head of the slavers." Gordon, forgetting the disagreement which had arisen between him and his former captain after the exploration of the Albert Lake, offered him the difficult and dangerous command of the expedition against the rebels. Gessi hesitated at first, having already experienced too much of the ingratitude of the Egyptian Government, but urged by Dr. Junker, and remembering his old ties of friendship with Gordon, and attracted, moreover, by the very difficulties of the enterprise, which corresponded to the iron energy of his character, he accepted.

What he accomplished in this memorable campaign his memorials modestly tell us. Schweinfurth called him at this time " the legendary man," and from the letters of Junker, Casati, the Rev. Mr. Wilson, Felkin, and fragments of the book of Buchta, the reader can see in what account his achievements Avere held by men who had personalh' visited the theatre of the war in which he fought.

Suffice it to say that Gessi, with a few hundred soldiers untrained and far inferior to the numerous hordes of Suleiman, the sole Christian and sole European, with a traitorous staff officer formerly a