III. 2. X. THE GUHAYNA GROUP 247

strength to keep up order and inforce his decrees in pubUc matters. As for oeconomical ones, each tribe was under the government of its own Shekh,

old men, fathers of famihes in each clan.

The residence of this Arab prince...was at Gerri, a town in the very

limit of the tropical rains, immediately upon the ferry which leads across

the Nile to the desert of Bahiouda, and the road to Dongola and Egypt,

joining the great desert of Selima. This was a very well chosen situation,

it being a toll-gate as it were to catch all the Arabs that had flocks, who,

living within the rains in the country which was all of fat earth, were every year, about the month of May, obliged by the fly to pass, as it were

in review, to take up their abode in the sandy desert without the tropical

rains. ...The Arab chief with a large army of light unincumbered horse

stood in the way of their return to their pastures till they had paid the^ uttermost farthing of tribute, including arrears if there were any. Such was the state and government of the whole of this vast country from the

frontiers of Egypt to those of Abyssinia at the beginning of the i6th

century.

Clearly the Arabs had no enviable lot. Bruce may again be

quoted^:

The Arabs who fed their flocks near the frontiers of the two countries, were often plundered by the kings of Abyssinia making descents into the Atbara ; but this was never reckoned a violation of peace between the two

sovereigns. On the contrary as the motive of the Arabs for coming south

into the frontiers of Abyssinia was to keep themselves independent and out of the reach of Senaar, when the king of Abyssinia fell upon them

there he was understood to do that monarch service, by driving them down

farther within his reach.

The attitude of the rulers of Abyssinia and Sennar towards the Arabs was in fact exactly that of the Mamluks in Egypt in the Middle Ages and of the Sultans of Darfur in recent times.

By the time of the Turkish conquest of the Sudan the 'Abdullab had been independent of the kingdom of Sennar for some fifty years, but the northern districts of their country for the whole of that

period had been a prey to the marauding Shaikia^. In name, how-

ever, they still ruled the country as far south as the junction of the Binder and the Blue Nile^.

X The InkerriAb. Connected by race with the 'Abdullab are the Inkerriab of Berber Province.

A MS. in the possession of one of them (but not included in the

following collection*) gives 'AbduUa Gema'a, whom, by the way the

^ Vol. IV, Bk. IV, p. 4. 2 Cailliaud, ii, 195.

' Ibid. pp. 198 and 220. " Lodaguib" there is of course Wad 'Agib.

* An Arabic copy was kindly sent me by Mr F. C. C. Balfour of the Sudan Civil Service. The author of the MS. says " I copied it from another who copied it from

its owner Sheikh 'Omar ibn Muhammad, who brought a copy from Medfna...from the noble Sayyids." Probably it is nearly all a fake.