Report to Gordon.

55 treated better, they averring that the aiitliorities had not known how to prepare sufficient forces.

" These Vekil had, nevertheless, recent news from Khartoum. They knew that Abu-Sud was on the way, and would shortly arrive. From all this I Avas able to infer that the Vekil are joromjjtly informed of all that ha])pens at Khartoum and other places.

" The evening of the same day, Mr. Kempt arrived at our camp, and delivered new instructions to me.

" The Village of Mc.shra.

" This village, not distinguished by the natives by a sj)ecial name, is composed of about forty huts, where live a part of the crews of the nugars, which touch there to buy ivory, and the representatives of the Vekil, A hundred feet aAvay are another hundred huts, to accommodate the slaves as they arrive. Meslira is situated on an island in the midst of the stream.

" The water is very Ioav, and the nugars cannot approach the land, excepting the Nile is at full. The air is very bad, pestilential in fact, and at first I could not discover the reason ; but afterwards, having strayed further from the cabins, I discovered fifty corpses lying unburied. Hundreds of vultures and other birds of prey devoured, or carried away, the entrails of these poor creatures. I tried to persuade a Vekil that it was, in their own interests, urgently necessary to bury these corpses. He replied, laughing at my ingenuousness, that the work would be too heavy, for when the Vekil arrive from the interior great numbers of their slaves die, and the Vekil have something else to do than to bury the dead. In fact, on leaving the seribe to go to Meshra, the soldiers carry with them just the doora necessary for them and their slaves, but as they capture others by the way, many slaves die along the road for want