R and I should have enriched it. But the Turkish government, even for its own advantage, will not take trouble. As for me, I took great trouble; I worked hard and long. All that I did is wasted now, but if circumstances had gone otherwise, if, instead of living at Cairo for ten years, I had been in Darfour for ten years, it would now be a peaceful country with roads open in all directions, and its riches would be passing out in caravans to exchange with the goods of Europe. "On the whole, therefore, you think it is a country which would pay for good government?" upon European maps. When the Nile is they will do anything, but they can only be governed by kindness." Ismail Yacoub, for whom the way was thus prepared, was briefly described by the pasha in a term which the interpreter translated as a "rubbish man." He came into Darfour knowing nothing of the country which he had undertaken to govern, and having no thought but to get rich. One of his first acts was to seize some of the leading men and even women of high family, and to send them down in irons to Cairo. Some died on the way, others are to this day in prison there. "That," the pasha commented, "is not the way to govern. He ought to have had every one of those men for his friends." He brought with him a staff of seventy clerks, and proceeded to levy a poll tax of forty piastres upon a people who had never been individually taxed before. The poll tax was to become due at the age of sixteen, so that a man having several sons at home had to pay for them and for himself too. The very poor hitherto had paid nothing. Farmers and others had made their contributions to the government in grain or in any goods that they happened to possess. The notion of a poll tax of two dollars a head, which, in the case of large families, mounted up to such a sum in the the purpose of maintaining a military con- | from the kingdoms lying to the west and tingent. He did not give his soldiers any north of Darfour. pay, but he gave arms and a horse and certain privileges to individuals chosen for military service. They were free in time of peace to do as they pleased, but in return for these advantages they were bound to follow him in war when called upon. Once a year the soldiers of each district were called out and inspected by the sultan. If he was pleased with their number and condition, the governor of the district was praised and rewarded; if, on the contrary, he was displeased, the basha was correspondingly censured or, it might be, removed. The internal government of the district depended almost entirely upon the personal character of the basha. So long as the tribute was paid and the military contingent satisfactory, the sultan asked few questions. The readiest means of escape from an oppressive governor was for the people to load their goods upon camels and flee into the desert. In a country where wide tracts existed of rich and unclaimed land this was easy to do, and under bad governors whole villages migrated, thus depriving the district of their labor and their tribute. In the most literal manner the rule of the unjust impoverished the land, and was to a certain extent checked by its own con-year as they seldom saw, filled them with sequences. Round Darfour there were wild tribes who made constant raids upon the sultan's dominions, and the prisoners taken in these border wars were enslaved. Otherwise there was not much slave-hunting in Darfour itself. It was in the neighborhood of Shekka, along the caravan roads, that slave-hunting was unendurable. At the beginning of the war Zebehr had no desire but to put down slave-hunting, in order to clear the roads. In the eight letters which passed between him and the sultan this is clearly set forth as the cause of the war. But when at the end of the two campaigns he found himself master of Darfour, his views began to enlarge; he entertained schemes for the government of that great province, and interested himself in the people. While the negotiations between him and the Egyptian government on the subject of its transfer were taking place, he took one or two steps which appeared to him necessary in organization, and applied himself to a study of existing conditions, entering into relations with the great men of the country, and gathering information from them. He did not forget his favorite policy of opening the roads, but received deputations having that object dismay. Although the country is rich the larger number of individuals are excessively poor. They have food but no coin, and could not pay if they would. To be called upon to do so simply terrified them and drove them from their homes. Deputations came to Zebehr imploring him to intercede, and he remonstrated with Ismail Yacoub. "This is not government," he said, "it is spoliation. What you are doing will ruin the country, and sooner or later it will rise against you." Ismail at first resented the interference, and signified to Zebehr that it was no business of his. Afterwards he sent for him, and asked his advice, saying in mockery: "What do you suppose I am going to do? Shall I leave this people untaxed?" "I do not say that you should leave them untaxed," Zebehr replied, “but that this tax you have put upon them is too heavy for a first year. Hear me ! In the If a tax of two dollars should seem small as a cause of insurrection, let the reader remember the Irish tithe riots, when in one parish in Carlow upwards of two hundred of the defaulters were rated at only a farthing a year, and in some cases the tithe fell to the seventh of a farthing. P first year let the tax for the poor be two | remains, and some day a better race may Zebehr said: "You think so, but you "When you yourself undertook to pay a yearly tribute to the Egyptian government, from what source did you propose to draw it?" "Not from the taxes of the poor! I was a working merchant, as every gov. ernor of a semi-civilized State must be if he wants to have a revenue without oppression. I have told you of my income. I had of course a number of clerks who kept my books, and if I were at home I could tell you exactly what profits came from each branch of trade. I cannot carry the details in my memory; but roughly, as well as I remember, my last accounts showed a net profit of £12,000 a month. It was from this that I should have paid my tribute, and it would have been well worth my while to have given £15,000 a year in order to have the support and sympathy of the government. As you know, I never paid the tribute; for the conquest of Darfour, following in the same year in which the agreement was signed, altered all arrangements." "But you do not disapprove of the principle of taxing a people in order to meet the expenses of government?" Ismail Yacoub would not listen to reason. His house at home was empty, and he wanted to fill it. He was not a governor, for he had no thought of those he governed, and no sympathy with their wants. He did not wish patiently to cultivate the soil, but to sweep off the crops "On the contrary! On the contrary! and go. What he did was like reaping So long as the people get full value from green corn. He ruined the country in the government for what they pay it is order to enrich himself a little. So it has just and right that they should be taxed. ever been with the governors of the Sou- But in barbarous countries the tax must dan. That district well governed might be very small, and the governor cannot be in time the treasury of Egypt, but no expect to draw a large income from it. one knows how it is despoiled. You have In the countries of which we were speakto understand that difficulty of transporting, a small tax is desirable for two reamakes Khartoum as far, perhaps farther, sons. One reason is to give an excuse for from Cairo than India is from London. counting the population, and the second Everything is in the hands of the governors, and it is essential that they should be good men. But instead of this, every governor goes down poor and comes back rich. To change is no use, for it only sends a hungry man in the place of one half satisfied. It is for this reason that the Turkish government cannot keep the Soudan. Still do not think that the Turkish rule has been altogether bad for these barbarous peoples. There has been some good and some bad in it. When the Turks conquered the country it was very wild. There were no roads, it was impossible that merchants should travel. The good done by the Turkish government has been to open the roads. The evil has been that greedy officials have cheated and oppressed the natives. But the roads remain, and the habit of trade is to accustom the people to the idea of government as a valuable thing -a thing which it is worth their while to pay for, and which must be supported by them. Unless there is an idea of mutual duty between the governed and the government political order is not possible. But for both these reasons it was essential that the tax should be scarcely more than nominal. As regards the counting of the people, a heavy tax simply frightened them away. I have told you how it was their habit to flee from their own bad governors into the desert, and far from enabling the governor to count them, the tax evidently caused them to be hidden from him, thus defeating its own end. Again, with regard to teaching them the benefits of settled government, a large tax was in excess of any benefits that they could realize. It seemed to them that they | and many other similar negotiations came gave more than they received, and instead to nothing in consequence of the failure of a beneficial interchange of profit, gov- of his principal hope. ernment appeared in the light of an organized system of robbery." This and much more Zebehr laid before Ismail Yacoub. The only result was that Ismail Yacoub sent complaints to Cairo that Zebehr was thwarting him and frustrating his plans, giving up the province to him nominally, but not allowing him to have his own way. The khedive telegraphed to Zebehr to forbid any interference on his part with the schemes of Ismail Yacoub, and then Zebehr felt that the only hope of saving Darfour lay in a personal interview with the khedive. Any report that he might write ran risk of suppression, or what was worse, of falsification. He thought that if he saw the khedive face to face, and reported to him personally of the state of things in Darfour, some good might be achieved. He therefore telegraphed that he wished to go down and see the khedive at Cairo. The khedive answered with a very cordial invitation to him to come, and he went down in state. Before starting he disbanded the greater part of his army, and put the remaining six thousand under the nominal command of his son Suleiman, a lad of fifteen.* He was already on the way when he was overtaken by a deputation from the king of Borku, who offered himself as a tributary, and proposed to open his roads. The letter of this king was also among the papers that were taken at the time of Zebehr's imprisonment by the English. His deputation brought with it two horses as a present to Zebehr. Zebehr sent back four horses fully caparisoned, and said, "If your king is in earnest let him send and meet me at Cairo, where we will discuss these things before the khedive, and enter into a treaty." The king of Tagali also came and offered himself, saying, "We have heard a good report of you, and if you will have us we will submit ourselves to you." Tagali is a mountainous district in Kordofan, about three days' journey south of El Obeid, and it is a very wild place, which up to that time had preserved its independence, refusing to submit to the rulers of either Darfour or Kordofan. To the king of Tagali, Zebehr also answered that these matters would be arranged before the khedive, and he pursued his way. These * Gordon speaks of this lad as being two-and-twenty years of age at the time of his death. His real age was sixteen. It was at this period that the commonly related incident of the council under the tree is supposed to have taken place. "There is a large tree," wrote Colonel Gordon, "on the left-hand side of the road from Obeid to Shaka about two miles from Shaka. Under this tree Zebehr assembled his officers and swore them to obey him. If he sent word to them to attend to the arrangements made under the tree they were to revolt." I read this passage from Birkbeck Hill's "Gordon in Central Af rica" to the pasha. He smiled and shook his head. "Another of Idris Abtar's," he said; "there is not a word of truth in it. It is not only untrue. If you think of it you will see that it is so unlikely as to be impossible. At the time at which it is supposed to have happened I was strong and at the head of a victorious army. Every one knows that I am no coward. If I had contemplated a revolt against the government I should not have been such a fool as to hand over the province to Ismail Yacoub, to leave my army in the hands of a child, and to go and put myself voluntarily into the khedive's power at Cairo. Also you must know that these are all old stories examined during three years by the khedive Ismail and proved to have no foundation. It is absurd after so searching an investigation to ask me now to deny them. If there had been foundation for them, do you suppose that I should be alive to give you this contradiction? Assuredly not." The action of Idris Abtar and his relation to Gordon, which involved to some considerable extent also the pasha's rela tion to Gordon, belong properly to a later portion of Zebehr's life, but as I do not propose to carry this narrative_further than his arrival at Cairo in 1875, I repeat here some portion of what he told me with regard to it. Zebehr was at Cairo when Gordon went for the second time into the Soudan. They met just before Gordon started for Khartoum, and they talked over the affairs of the province. Gordon asked Zebehr to give him such help as he could, and Zebehr promised to do so. "You are European and I am Arabic," he said, "but we can be friends. I have a son about sixteen years of age. He is yours. I give him to you, and I will write to him to obey you in everything." He wrote accordingly to Suleiman, telling him to honor Gordon and to follow his instructions. When Gordon got down into the Soudan he was immediately surrounded | quired into the matter, but clever as Gor- When the troops had been disbanded at Upon this Idris was frightened and es- • The account given by Gordon at the time, although it differs very much in spirit, corroborates this narrative in the main facts. Gordon's councillors at Khartoum advised that Idris Abtar should be made governor of the White Nile. Two thousand soldiers were given to him, and he went down to fight against the boy. Suleiman, hearing of it, wrote to Gordon, saying: "This man is a badly behaved servant of my father's. He lies; he is dangerous and depraved. I blamed him for his conduct and he fled to you. Now you put my servant over me. I cannot for the shame of it submit to him. Send, if you please, any man except this one. Let him be Turkish or European and I will submit; but I cannot to my servant." Before any answer could come Idris attacked. Suleiman fought and was victorious. Many were killed; Idris himself ran away, and returned by water to Khartoum, where he laid his complaint and The pasha rereport before Gordon. peated these circumstances twice over |