The British Campaign in the Soudan. 151 tent under a common standard, and at the most critical and opportune moment the leader arose.

In the town of New-Dongola, on the west bank of the Nile, some forty-four years ago, was born a Nubian boy with all the characteristics of his race; a tall, well-proportioned form, dark-brown complexion, straight features, long and crisp, but not woolly hair. His name was Mohammed-Achmet, and his occupation in youth that of a carpenter and boat-builder. Before reaching manhood he resolved to become a fakir, and for this purpose he learned to read and write. The fakirs (Arab plural, tokarah) ave a class who may be considered as_ half priests, half laymen. They are the school-teachers of Mussulman countries, and the instruction they impart is limited to reading and writing Arabic and learning by heart as much of the Koran as possible. They are also the expounders of the Koran which is not only the religious but also the civil and political law of Islam, so that they are to some extent the lawyers of the country ; nor are they without medical pretensions, though their practice consists mainly in charms and the use of written texts of the Koran applied to the person of the patient or taken internally. A great portion of their income is derived from the sale of amulets supposed to protect the wearer against bullets and wild beasts, and the crops and flocks from the evil-eye.* Their influence over the superstitious masses is immense. They are always called * One of the Egyptian staff-lieutenants attached to my expedition, a graduate of the Cairo Military School, quite intelligent, a fair mathematician and surveyor, reading and speaking French fluently, but a devout Mussulman, wore an amulet composed of leaves of desert plants, the hair of a hyena, a piece of serpent-skin, the whole wrapped in a piece of parchment on which was a text of the Koran written by a fakir. This talisman, he assured me in all seriousness, rendered him invulnerable to all attacks of wild beasts as well as to the influence of the ‘‘ evil-eye.”