The British Campaign in the Soudan. ‘141 well provided with firearms. A bargain is soon concluded, and they make a joint night-attack upon the enemy’s villages, setting the straw huts on fire. All the warriors who resist are shot down with musketry as they rush out of their blazing homes. ‘The rest, together with the women and children are captured, as well as the cattle still coralled in the zeribas.* The negro chief is delighted, for his enemy is “ wiped out,” and he himself is rewarded with fifty or one hundred cattle and three or four handsome slave girls. He and his people covet cattle above all things, and the trader has captured probably some two thousand head which he proceeds to barter for ivory—a cow for a tusk, which is all profit since the cows have cost him nothing. When no more ivory is to be had, the trader usually picks a quarrel with his late allies who in their turn are murdered or enslaved, their women, children, and the coveted cattle being added to the previously acquired booty. — In an average season, a party one hundred and fifty strong will secure ivory to the amount of £5,000. The men are paid their wages in cattle and slaves which have cost nothing, and receive in addition one third of the stolen cattle, leaving some four or five hundred slaves worth five or six pounds per head for the trader’s own profit. ‘These he crowds into his boats, guarded by a few of his men, while the rest establish zeribas from which they raid the country all around and procure more slaves for the time when their leader returns the next year with a larger force.

* This word, of frequent occurrence hereafter, is spelled variously—zaribah, zeriba, etc., in the attempt to represent its true sound, which is zah-reé-bah, with accent on middle syllable. It means an enclosure, generally of thorny brush-wood, or a stockade.