A WORTHLESS GOVERNOR. 413 



Defa'allah's slaves were subsequently confiscated, twenty-seven 

 were found to belong to Abd-es-Sadik. 



In explanation of the phrase that " he had assigned a village 

 to him/' it may be as well to remark that all the officials here 

 had a number of male slaves, whom they armed — of course 

 with arms and ammunition belonging to the Government. 

 These fellows then settled down in the native villages, and 

 compelled the inhabitants by force of arms to contribute all 

 sorts of produce, which they partly used for their own support, 

 but sent most of it to their masters' houses. Yusuff Pasha 

 Hassan, Hassan Bey Ibrahim, Mula Effendi, and the rest of 

 these petty Satraps have thus kept up dozens of these robbers' 

 nests here, concealed by the prestige of their names. Other 

 armed slaves went about the country, hunting up slaves for 

 their masters. That all these slaves carried on slave-hunting 

 on their own account need scarcely be mentioned. 



My stay at Ayak lasted a long time, since Mula Effendi, 

 the chief of the whole district of R51, naturally showed no 

 inclination to proceed against his accomplices. He had, indeed, 

 himself at Ayak a branch establishment of his chief house 

 at Rumbek, with fifty to sixty inmates. 



Rumbek is not far from Ayak, so that the people there had 

 had time to send away any slaves from whom gossip or com- 

 plaints were apprehended, and even in some cases to send 

 them free to their homes. If the number of such was four 

 hundred in Ayak, it was here from six hundred to seven hun- 

 dred, while the total number of slaves in Rumbek before my 

 arrival was reckoned by the people themselves at over three 

 thousand. The station was a fearful place, as bad as brandy, 

 syphilis, the slave-trade, and debauchery of every sort could 

 make it. Happily, my order that every man should now pay 

 regular taxes and officially announce the number of his slaves 

 had done away with the desire to stay among the scum of 

 Khartum which had collected here, and I was glad enough to 

 dismiss all this rabble to Khartum, and to permit them to 

 retreat to the Bakr-el-Ghazal, where the Danagla rdgimc flour- 

 ishes as it did before Gessi's time. The morning after my 

 arrival one hundred and sixty-five Monbuttu slaves of both 

 sexes (among them a number of children of five to six), who 



