52 
TRAVELS IN CENTRAL AFRICA. 
prisoners^ who, during a revolt of the Arabs, had, under the offer 
of a free pardon, been induced to lay down their arms. 
Subsequent to the above he became Chief of Police at Cairo, 
and President of the Council until 1859. His next important step 
was his appointment by the present Viceroy to the Governor ' 
Generalship of the Soudan, and in 1862 he was created Mushir, 
and General of Division, to take charge of the army that was then 
accumulating in the Soudan, and believed to take the field against 
the late Emperor of Abyssinia, and, although last not least, the 
occupation of the White Nile, and the conquest of its people. 
August 27th . — Miss Tinne and her suite had obtained camels, 
and left for Sonakim, and as there were none forthcoming for us, 
and furnished with letters to a sheikh, near Aboo Hamed, by the 
Governor, we determined to proceed thither by boat, in the hope, 
by the exercise of my own exertions in addition to the letters in 
question, to obtain a sufficient number of cattle wherewith to cross 
the desert. 
With this view I sent on our own dromedaries and donkeys, and 
left our moorings with indifferent hopes of success. In two hours 
we arrived under Djebel Mezzum, a bleak sandstone rock, with the 
ruin of a kiosk on its summit, that had been constructed by an 
Egyptian Governor named Mochow Bey, not many years after 
the conquest of the Soudan, under the ill-fated Ismail Pasha. 
Before night we made fast opposite an island called Abydyeh. 
The day following, August 2^th, both sides of the river were 
marked by numerous groves of the bifurcated palm, intermingled 
with plantations of date-palms that were laden with clusters of 
ripening fruit. In the fields Indian-corn and millet were in 
