rticles I saw were: Ivory, powder, percussion caps,
old lead, copper, tin, bronze, cloth, looms, pianos, sewing machines,
agricultural implements, boilers, steam-engines, ostrich feathers,
gum, hippopotamus hides, iron and wooden bedsteads, drums, bugles,
field glasses--Lieutenant Charles Grenfell's, lost at El Teb in the
Eastern Soudan in 1883, were found there--bolts, zinc, rivets, paints,
india-rubber, leather, boots, knapsacks, water-bottles, flags, and
clothes. There were three state coaches--one of them might at a pinch
have served for the Lord Mayor--and an American buggy. They needed a
little retrimming, but there was harness and material enough to have
rigged out the four vehicles in style. In short, the arsenal held the
jettisoned cargo of the whole aforetime Egyptian Soudan, with much
besides drawn from Abyssinia and Central Africa. Truly, the Khalifa
must have been a strange man, with a fine acquisitive instinct
abnormally cultivated.

[Illustration: NEUFELD, WITH ABYSSINIAN WIFE AND CHILDREN; ALSO FELLOW
PRISONER.]

Neufeld, quite contrary to Slatin Pasha's way of speaking, declared to
me that the Khalifa was not at all a bad sort of man, nor an
exceptionally cruel Arab task-master, and certainly not a monster. The
Khalifa, he said, had often come and chatted with him. Abdullah had
vowed to him, that if he were able to have his own way he would make a
close friend of him, and have him always near his person. The Khalifa
asserted he liked white men, admired their knowledge and ability, and
would, were he permitted, have many of them in Khartoum. As everybody
knew, he befriended the Greeks, because he could do that with safety,
for the natives were not so jealous of them as of other white men. The
Taaisha were, he declared, absurdly suspicious of his intercourse with
Neufeld, and were always bringing him tales, to try and get him to
kill all the white men without exception. His countrymen's jealous,
narrow fanaticism annoyed him, but what, he asked, could he do, for he
was very much in their power, and unable to afford to fly in their
faces? Abdullah often spoke thus, according to Neufeld, and, as the
latter also said, frequently that leader of the fanatical dervishes
exhibited keen interest in acquiring information about Europe and its
people. He hoped to make peace some day with the outside world, and be
allowed thereafter to rule the Soudan. All this, I submit, is rather
puzzling, in view of the filthy d