80 
THE BOY SAAT. 
[chap. III. 
were allowed to stray, and were daily missing, and 
recovered with difficulty; the luggage was overrun 
with white ants instead of being attended to every 
morning ; the men absented themselves without leave, 
and were constantly in the camps of the different 
traders. I was fully prepared for some difficulty, but 
I trusted that when once on the march I should be 
able to get them under discipline. 
Among my people were two blacks : one, “ Bicharn,” 
already described as having been brought up by the 
Austrian Mission at Khartoum ; the other, a boy of 
twelve years old, “ Saat.” As these were the only 
really faithful members of the expedition, it is my duty 
to describe them. Bicharn was an habitual drunkard, 
but he had his good points; he was honest, and much 
attached to both master and mistress. He had been with 
me for some months, and was a fair sportsman, and being 
an entirely different race to the Arabs, he kept himself 
apart from them, and fraternised with the boy Saat. 
Saat was a boy that would do no evil; he was 
honest to a superlative degree, and a great exception 
to the natives of this wretched country. He was a 
native of “ Fertit,” and was minding his father s goats, 
when a child of about six years old, at the time of his 
capture by the Baggara Arabs. He described vividly 
how men on camels suddenly appeared while he was in 
the wilderness with his flock, and how he was forcibly 
seized and thrust into a large gum sack, and slung 
upon the back of a camel. Upon screaming for help, 
the sack was opened, and an Arab threatened him with 
a knife should he make the slightest noise. Thus 
quieted, he was carried hundreds of miles through 
Kordofan to Dongola on the Nile, at which place he 
was sold to slave-dealers, and taken to Cairo to be sold 
to the Egyptian government as a drummer-boy. Being 
too young he was rejected, and while in the dealers 
hands he heard from another slave, of the Austrian 
Mission at Cairo, that would protect him could he only 
reach their asylum. With extraordinary energy for a 
