145 
•APPENDIX A. 
amount was paid of my own free will^ and that I aeknowledged the 
justiee of the measure ! 
This was too much ! and withholding my assent^ I was officially 
informed that I might do what I liked with my boats,, but that 
not a man in my employ should leave Khartoum/^ In order to 
keep my arrangements with Baker^ I conformed without further 
demurj and paid the tax ; but,, with regard to my trade^ it was thus 
summarily stopped. I, however^, resolved that as soon as my wife^s 
and my own health would permit^ to proceed to seek that redress 
from Her Majesty^s Government to which^ as a British subject,, I 
felt myself entitled. 
Moosa Pasha^ the then Governor- General of Ihe Soudan^ a 
thorough tyrant and great tactician^, knowing that I had hitherto 
met with no support whatever from my Government, either with 
respect to commercial questions or the steps I had taken in pro- 
secuting persons engaged in the slave trade^ had presumed upon 
the probability of their continued inaction^ and had allowed matters 
to take their course as described. But so soon as it was known to 
him that Earl Bussell had abolished my Consulate,, then there were 
no bounds to his unmitigated rage for my ruin. After our depar- 
ture from Khartoum he issued instructions to his sub -governors to 
prevent our obtaining the necessary number of camels wherewith to 
cross the desert of Aboo Hamad. 
Two months were frittered away in fruitless endeavours to obtain 
twenty-five camels by promises of unheard-of high rates of pay. 
As a last resource,, intimidation prevailed upon a local despot to 
send us eight camels. Thus, in addition to our own two drome- 
daries, and by the abandonment of every dispensable article of 
luggage it was thought we might, with safety to our lives, succeed 
in crossing the most sterile and forbidding of deserts. We did 
10 
VOL. II. 
