HOW WILD ANIMALS ARE CAUGHT 69 
town, to await the arrival of one of the steamers, which 
periodically call there, to take them to Suez. At Suez they 
are either transhipped to a steamer coming from India or the 
Far East; or preferably they are sent by train to Alexandria, 
and shipped from there to one of the Mediterranean ports— 
Trieste, Genoa, or Marseilles. When they arrive there 
another railway journey still lies before them, and it is usually 
another ten days before the animals and their keepers are 
safely lodged at Hamburg. The entire journey from the 
camp at Atbara or on the Gash occupies nearly three months. 
During the long period of the Mahdi’s régime, when the 
whole country was closed, many changes were wrought in 
this paradise of animals. Under the joint government of 
Egypt and Great Britain order has been slowly restored, but 
alas! the country is not what it was. There is scarcely a 
tenth of the game now that there was thirty years ago. 
The elephants, formerly so abundant, are only found in small 
herds ; the rhinoceros is almost extinct; the giraffe is rare; 
antelopes have altogether vanished from many localities ; 
while thousands of buffalo have fallen victims to the rinder- 
est. 
. The war against the Mahdi is both the direct and indirect 
cause of this sad destruction of animal life. When the 
Egyptian Government was overthrown, the natives came into 
possession of large stores of modern breech-loaders ; which, 
in the intervals between killing each other, they used for 
killing animals of all kinds. It must be admitted that they 
had a strong incentive to this slaughter. For, while the 
treasury of the Mahdi was filled to bursting, the people of his 
kingdom were being decimated by starvation. When the 
Sudan had been utterly ravaged, and nothing was left to 
plunder, the wild game was the only means of sustenance 
that remained to them; and a fierce rush for meat took 
place. Whole armies set up their camps in the midst of our 
hunting-ground and slaughtered game ex masse, especially 
