The unfortunate captives were chained together to prevent escape, and
often the fastenings were secured in a way so unnecessarily cruel, that
they had great difficulty in securing any sleep, either at night or
during the day when the periodical halts were made. Indeed the ordinary
precautions that we take in the convoy of large herds of cattle were
generally neglected. This is all the more surprising when we consider
what great trouble these men took to secure their victims; one would
have thought that self-interest at least would often have dictated a
more humane policy, but it does not appear to have been so.

* * *

In hunting for these gangs of slaves, it was a subject of deep regret
to Gordon that often his action only tended to increase their
sufferings. In the Central African deserts there are only a few wells,
at long intervals, and the poor captives suffered terrible thirst on
the march from well to well. But the surest way of intercepting the
gangs was to hold the wells. When the slave-dealers knew that a certain
well on which they were marching was held by Gordon, they would make a
detour in order to avoid him, and their unfortunate victims would be
kept from quenching their thirst for unusually long periods, with the
result that many would succumb to the appalling heat. If a slave
exhibited great exhaustion, and showed little chance of being able to
reach the next halting-place, the drivers would not even trouble to
waste a round of ammunition, but, unchaining the victim, would kill him
by a blow on the back of the neck with a mallet or a piece of wood, and
leave his body where it lay, to feed the vultures. Often young girls,
and even infants, were marched through deserts, through which Gordon
declared that he shuddered to contemplate a journey on his fleet-footed
camel. It was with truth that Burns said--

"Man's inhumanity to man
Makes countless thousands mourn."

Some of the slave traders had become very rich, and one of them, Zebehr
Rahama, now in captivity in Gibraltar, had become so powerful that even
the Khedive dared not molest him. His field of operations lying at a
considerable distance from Gordon's province, these two did not come in
contact, until the latter was made Governor-General of the whole of the
Soudan, and so it is not at the present time necessary to do more than
merely allude to him as the king of slave hunters. Many more carried on