This is the fate of more than one village until a sufficient number of slaves has been collected, or the expedition is unable any longer to withstand the climate, or the attacks of an exasperated foe. Burning, plundering, and destroying, the soldiers return to Chartum. The caravan moves slowly. The men wounded in battle or with necks chafed by the Scheba, the poor women half-dead from thirst and hunger, the weak children cannot possibly walk fast. Brehm witnessed the arrival of a transport of Dinkh negroes at Chartum and was for weeks after haunted by the dreadful sight, the horrors of which no pen could describe, no words express. It was on January 12, 1848. Before the government house, about sixty men and women sat in a circle on the ground. All the men were shackled, the women free. Children were creeping on all fours between them. The wretches lay exposed without the least protection to the rays of the burning sun, too exhausted, too dispirited to murmur or to complain, their dull glassy eyes immovably fixed on one spot, and yet full of an indescribably mournful expression. Blood and matter issued from the wounds of the men, but no word of pity, no helping hand was there to alleviate their sufferings. Involuntarily the eye of the spectator sought out the most miserable objects of the miserable group, and found them in a mother worn down to a skeleton by despair, hunger, and fatigue, and vainly pressing her famished infant to her dried-up breast. It seemed to him as if he saw the Angel of Death hovering over the wretched pair, as if he heard the rustling of his wings, and from the bottom of his heart he prayed that God might soon send the deliverer to release them from their sufferings.
FOOTNOTES
[1] Captain Stokes’s ‘Discoveries in Australia.’
[2] ‘Narrative of Missionary Enterprise in the South Sea Islands,’ p. 390.
[3] Though frequently confounded, even by the Peruvian Creoles, the western chain, running parallel with the coast of the Pacific, is properly the Cordillera, while the eastern chain, which generally runs in the same direction as the former, has always been named the Andes by the Indian natives.
[4] It is only in the Old World that the reindeer has ever been domesticated.
[5] For a more detailed account of the Peruvian Guano Islands, see ‘The Sea and its Living Wonders.’ Second Edition, pp. 144, 147.
[6] ‘The Sea and its Living Wonders.’ Second Edition, p. 41.
[7] Ibid, p. 40.
[8] ‘The Sea and its Living Wonders,’ p. 195.