142 The British Campaign in the Soudan.

Meanwhile the slaver sails back down the Nile and is met at safe points by the regular slave-merchants called jellabs, mostly Arabs, waiting to purchase the slaves for ready cash. ‘These unfortunates are now marched off by various routes, avoiding the Egyptian garrisons, some down the Nile, others across the deserts to the Red Sea, multitudes perishing by the way. The survivors find a ready market in Egypt, Arabia, Turkey, Persia, and all the Mussulman provinces of Asia, while the successful adventurer returns with his ivory and gold to Khartoum, already a rich man. There he repays his loan with interest, purchases fresh supplies for the men he left behind, enlists more followers, and starts back the following December to operate year after year upon an ever-increasing scale.

The practical working of this system is fully illustrated by the, career of the notorious Zobehr-Pasha who rose from a common slave-hunting hireling to a conqueror, and narrowly missed becoming a king.

He was of that turbulent Dongola race who take to slave-hunting as naturally as a duck to water, and he began his career as a mere enlisted mercenary; but before long he started on his own account, and possessing a natural aptitude for organizing and commanding men, his zeribas were soon numbered by scores, forming a chain of fortified posts extending more than a thousand miles beyond Khartoum. Around his head-quarters at Shaka a town grew up as large as El Obeid, and there he kept up a royal state, with a body-guard, and chained live lions in his audience-hall. Dr. Schweinfurth states that in 1871 no less than 2,700 jellabs visited that place to buy the numerous slaves Zobehr had captured and