By a remarkable accident one of my most important manuscripts, happily for me, escaped the conflagration in Ghattas’s Seriba. The explosion of a chest of ammunition had sent the book flying high into the air, where it had been caught by a current of wind caused by the glow, and, being carried for some distance, fell to the ground in a wood outside the Seriba; after the lapse of many days it was picked up by some natives and brought to me with no other damage than that the edges of the leaves had been slightly singed. The manuscript contained a copious vocabulary of the Bongo dialect and a collection of carefully translated phrases and sentences. I could not fail to accept this recovered treasure as an incitement to the further prosecution of my linguistic studies, and I set to work at once to replace my Dyoor and Niam-niam vocabularies. The idioms of the far south and east, which I had so laboriously committed to writing, the dialects of the Mittoo tribes, of the Behl, of the Babuckur, and the Monbuttoo, were unfortunately irrecoverably lost, for during my subsequent residence in the Seribas I could never meet with competent interpreters.
My old friend Khalil commanded greater respect from his subordinates, and maintained more order and discipline in his Seriba, than any other controller belonging to a Khartoom mercantile firm with whom I ever became acquainted. With him, the settler who had been longest in the country, I spent many a pleasant hour, and from his confidential gossip I gained many a hint that enabled me to form an accurate judgment upon the state of affairs. He complained very much about the undisciplined troops of his countrymen that were sent to him from Khartoom; he emphatically denounced the slave trade, and although he could not enter much into the humanity of the attempts for its suppression, yet he was fully alive to the disadvantages that it exercised upon the internal administration of the Seribas. He was extremely anxious that the natives under his jurisdiction should suffer no diminution in their numbers, and would often dispute with the itinerant slave-dealers their right to carry off property that they had obtained from his territory; he even endeavoured to exercise control over his subordinates in the subsidiary Seribas, although they generally contrived to elude his watchfulness. Whenever it happened that any orphan Dyoor or Bongo children had been sold to the Gellahbas, he would use all sorts of remonstrances and would spare no argument to induce the traders to surrender their booty.
“This boy,” he would say, “you can’t have him: in the course of three or four years he will be old enough to be a bearer, and will be able to carry his 70 lbs. of ivory to the Meshera; and this girl, you mustn’t take her: she will soon be of an age to be married and have children. Where do you suppose I am to get my bearers in future, if you run off with all the boys? and where do you expect that I shall find wives for my Bongo and Dyoor, if you carry all the girls out of the country?”
NUBIAN CHARACTER.
However reserved might be my behaviour towards the Nubians, yet my long period of daily intercourse with them gave me a tolerably deep insight into their character. It may perhaps appear incomprehensible how, with any equanimity, I could have endured for two years and a half the exclusive society of what was, for the most part, a mere rough rabble; but it must be remembered that the social position that I was able to maintain amongst them was very different to what it would have been amongst a party of rude and unpolished Europeans, and their religious fanaticism, as well as the entire difference of their habits, raised a strong barrier of defence against any sort of intimacy. Amongst the thousands of Nubian colonists with whom I was thrown in contact, I never met with a single individual who offered me any insult either in word or deed; I never had occasion to enter into anything like domestic relations with them, and never did otherwise than eat and sleep perfectly alone and in the seclusion of my own hut. But in spite of all my reserve I was a constant witness of the scenes in their daily life, and I believe that very few of their habits escaped my notice; it may not, therefore, be altogether uninteresting to insert here some results of my observations upon the character of my old travelling companions.
Throughout this account of my wanderings I have, for the sake of simplicity, always used the term “Nubians” to denote the present inhabitants of the Nile Valley, in contradistinction to the Egyptians and true Arabs (Syro-Arabians) on the one hand, and to the Ethiopian Bedouins and the Negroes on the other. I do not for a moment deny that the present Nubians (meaning by this term only the people who dwell on the banks of the river) must have sprung from various races. Independently of the three dialects of the Nubian language, which are those of Dongola, of Kenoos, and of Mahass (in which it is supposed that the still undeciphered ancient Ethiopian inscriptions are written), and independently of Arabic being the actual mother-language of the natives, who have, in fact, immigrated from Asia, and some of whom, as for instance the Sheigieh, have hitherto remained ignorant of the Nubian language altogether; they are yet all so united by one common bond alike of general habits and physical character, that they no longer exhibit any perceptible distinctions. It must also be remembered that these Nubian natives of the Nile district have for centuries not only intermarried with each other, but have also mixed so indiscriminately with slaves of every origin, that they have lost all traces of being other than a single race. Accordingly the use of the term “Nubian,” under the restriction named, may be justified in more than one respect, and may be fairly employed in geographical, ethnographical, or historical relations.
Whoever has become acquainted with the passive natives of Berber or Dongola[61] in Egypt only, or more especially in Alexandria, where they are trusted with the charge of house and home, and whoever has witnessed the patience with which they endure the antipathy of the residents, will be at a loss how to reconcile his own impression with the unfavourable one given by a traveller so faithful as Burckhardt,[62] who knew them before they were subjected to Egyptian domination, and has left on record his version of their national character.
As far as my own experience went, with regard to morality, I decidedly preferred the people of Berber to the Egyptians, and I believed that the change for the better that had taken place since Burckhardt’s visit to Berber and Shendy in 1822, had been owing to the more rigid government of the Turks on the one hand, and to the increasing physical luxury of the people of Berber on the other; for in their own homes I never found them to be otherwise than quiet and harmless.
VIRTUES AND VICES.
My impressions, however, were at that time very imperfect; but when I saw the people on the territory of the Bahr-el-Ghazal, that pasture-land for their hungry spirits, where they are beyond the jurisdiction of the Government and are no longer in dread of bastinadoes, extortions, taxation, or summonses to the divans of the satraps, and where there are no Egyptians to mock them with the insulting cry of “Barabra,”—then I discovered the true side of their nature, and all their leading traits came fully to light. Their character, a curious mixture of exemplary virtues and most repulsive vices, was not like a mechanical medley of antagonistic qualities, but was a composition in which each single quality seemed to partake of mingled good and evil, though unfortunately the evil decidedly preponderated.