132 The British Campaign in the Soudan.

and unscrupulous. He had no sooner consolidated his tenure of the vice-regal throne than he resolved to increase his territory. This was impossible within the narrow valley of the lower Nile; but above the arid deserts of Nubia are broad and fertile regions inside of the southern rain-belt, and well watered by the Atbara, the Sobat, and other affluents of the Nile. The so-called island of Meroé was formerly the centre of a civilization older than the Pharaohs. Standing upon the site of the ancient city, I counted no less than forty-two pyramids— smaller, it is true, than those of Gizeh, but of a size to be considered gigantic in any other land. Later still, Meroé was the seat of five populous Christian bishoprics.* Sennaar, lying between the White and the Blue Niles, possesses a soil of unrivalled fertility and produces wheat, corn, cotton, sugar, and gum in prodigious abundance, beside the senna to which it gives its name. Kordofan, on the west of the White Nile, is a sterile and almost waterless region, yet it yields vast quantities of ostrich feathers and the great bulk of the best gum-arabic of the world. But better still, the master of those provinces controls the rich trade of Central Africa—ebony, golddust, ivory, indigo, india-rubber, and above all, slaves. A pretext was easily found, and in 1822 Mehemet-Ali had achieved the conquest of Sennaar and Kordofan. Until that time the country had been ruled by numberless Sultans, as they called themselves, and its condition * A fact mentioned by early historians and confirmed by the researches of Monsignor Daniele Comboni, Bishop of Nigritia, a most accomplished Arabic scholar and archeologist. He wasanative of Verona, a man of splendid presence, genial nature, and the most liberal-minded priest I ever met. He accompanied me on my return journey from E] Obeid through Khartoum, Berber, and Suakim to Cairo, and he died in Kordofan in 1881, in the prime of middle life, a victim to the murderous climate.