408 CURIOSITIES TO BE SEEN AT KHARTOOM. 
Another gentleman, one of the oldest residents in 
Khartoom, was kind and attentive. This was Micha- 
eel, commonly called Lutfullah, a highly respectable 
banker and merchant. In advancing us funds, he 
would not accept the rate of exchange, so glad was he 
to serve the English Government ! 
Khartoom being upon the highway to Abyssinia 
and the countries of the "White Nile, it is quite an 
emporium for the trade and products and animals of 
those regions. At the residence of M. Thibaut, we 
saw a happy family of black and white geese, guinea- 
fowl, a Koodoo antelope, ariel, a Soakim long-horned 
goat, a Nyam Nyam goat, with immense long hair 
and short legs, and other genera. In his drawing- 
room, a chetah, a species of leopard, played with a 
pup -dog ; and in the garden a striped hyena, not 
thought fit company for those in the yard, was amus- 
ing himself on his chain. At the British Consulate 
two ostriches walked solemnly about the yard picking 
up sand; they had no feathers upon them, having 
been plucked as bare as the dead fowls in a poulterer's 
window. At the premises of a Marseille Mussulman, 
who had been in Khartoom for thirty years, we re- 
cognised a great assortment of arms and curiosities 
brought from the southern counties of Ilyria, Bari, and 
Shillook, but none of the Uganda weapons had reached 
him. The most remarkable shield we saw was in the 
possession of M. de Bono, who said it was used in 
Ilyria by the "rain-makers." It was of iron, dia- 
mond-shaped, three spans long, and above one span 
broad, with a handle of wood. Of M. Miani, whose 
name we had seen cut on the tree far up the country, 
we heard an amusing account. Having proceeded 
