136 The British Campaign in the Soudan.

highest tribunal and the sentence approved by the Khedive himself that he was executed; for no provincial governor was authorized to carry out a capital sentence, except Gen. Gordon, upon whom the powers of life and death had been conferred by special firman for the purpose of suppressing the slave trade. Even the wild Bedouins, fierce nomads without fixed habitations, and yielding only a limited allegiance, had been compelled to abandon the plundering habits of their forefathers, and their sheikhs were held answerable with their heads for the safety of life, travel, and property throughout their deserts. In many thousand miles of travel among the now rebellious tribes, the Bishareens, Hassaneeyehs, Kababeesh, and others, I have met hundreds of caravans loaded, some with the most valuable products of Central Africa, others with European goods going to the interior. The commerce thus carried on by land, exclusive of the river trade, amounted to twenty-five or thirty millions of dollars a year. Yet no caravan, large or small, needed the protection of an armed escort, and all travelled in perfect safety under the charge of unarmed camel-drivers and the half-dozen merchants owning the goods. The certainty of swift and stern punishment by the Khedive’s government, known to possess irresistible power to inflict it, was suflicient to guarantee security to all.

In Kordofan, one of the remote provinces, European as well as native merchants carried on an active trade by means of the electric telegraph, which reached to Darfour and the lakes, and they regulated their transactions by the daily quotations of ivory, gum and ostrich feathers at Cairo and Alexandria. This fact came under my personal observation at El Obeid, as well as the following.