THE DESERTS 
33 
the best recorded Sudan head was killed by Mr A. L. 
Butler, who now gives me the following most interesting 
note 
“The villagers at the Shabluka Gorge told me that 
when, in 1898, the Emir Mahmud passed the Shabluka on 
his march down the river to meet and give battle to Lord 
Kitchener’s advancing force, he spread out his army of 
some 10,000 men right-across these hills and 'drove 1 
them from the southern to the northern end (about 12 
miles), with the special object of rounding-up the wild- 
sheep that inhabited them. In the massacre that ensued 
at the northern limit of the range, forty-eight sheep were 
speared, a few only breaking back. A visit to the scene 
of slaughter resulted in my finding, after some search, a 
single horn of a good ram which I still keep as a trophy 
of Mahmud’s last hunt.” (A few weeks later, on April 
8th, 1898, the Dervish army was annihilated on the 
Atbara and Mahmud made a prisoner of war.) 
Mr Butler adds that on the same occasion he spent 
two days in searching for any sheep that might survive. 
On the afternoon of the second day he fell in with a herd 
of thirteen, all small with the exception of a single old 
ram, which he shot. Its horns measured 26 inches on 
the curve, 13 inches in circumference at base, and 24 
inches in spread. 
These wild-sheep at Shabluka are very considerably 
south of any previously recorded range. 
Then, on the eastern desert-plateaux, towards the Red 
Sea littoral, roam little bands of the Nubian wild-ass, 
commencing from near Sarrowit where we.saw them, but 
becoming more plentiful further south, in Eritrea, etc.-— 
big upstanding beasts, French-grey in colour, with stiff 
black manes, a conspicuous white muzzle and black 
shoulder-stripe. Wild-asses can hardly be counted as 
“game,” and are entirely protected bylaw: at the same 
time I should have liked to handle one specimen. 
c 
