THE NILE CATARACTS. 
519 
but what a prisoner they had brought. Not my well-known inter¬ 
preter, guide, and philosopher in neat European dress, but a mean¬ 
looking native in blue gallabeah and large white turban, with shaven 
face and shuffling gait. What a stupid mistake they had made. 
But, as I looked longer and closer, it dawned upon me that this 
Nubian native was no other than my late sportsman, my intelligent 
traveller, my excellent valet, my incomparable Ghendi. It was even 
so, and then the rude awakening that came to me ! He had gone 
back at one fell swoop to his original village, flung off his neat suit 
of European clothing, put on all the outward marks and tokens of 
Ethiopic Mohammedism, sold my large Egyptian donkey, treated 
the escaped slave in the same fashion, and was now the proprietor of 
a small sakeeyah and a large harem in the same spot from which he 
had been taken as an infant five-and-twenty years before. 
There is a proverb in the Soudan which says that “Arab's blood 
and Turk's blood will never boil together." Still less, I think, will 
the east and west amalgamate their ideas or their civilization. The 
ramparts of race are not to be thrown down by the whistle of the 
steam engine, but it is just possible that the engine may burst her 
boiler in attempting the operation. 
Meanwhile we have some distance to travel in our paper, and we 
must proceed with our Nile notes. 
In its course through the province of Dongola the Nile begins or 
ends, as we take the stream up or down, its great bend at Debbeh. 
From Debbeh to Khartoum by desert is 220 miles, but by river it 
is 570 miles. The yellow sands again border the stream for a con¬ 
siderable distance, and palm trees, except at rare intervals, have 
disappeared. The islands, however, and they are numerous, are 
always rich in cultivation. This bend of the river marked the old 
boundaries between the Dongolavi or Nubians, and the Shagghiea 
Arabs, one of the most celebrated tribes on the Nile, before the era 
of the Turkish conquest, and before we pass on our way we may say a 
few words about them. 
The Shagghiea speak only Arabic, and they speak it well, while 
their neighbours, the people of Dongola, speak Nubian and Arabic, the 
latter indifferently. The Shagghiea are undoubtedly of pure Arab 
blood; they have been settled on this portion of the Nile for ages, and 
were probably some of the earliest Arabs who, penetrating from the 
Red Sea, entered the kingdom of Nubia above the cataracts. But their 
warlike days ceased when the son of Mahemet Ali conquered the 
the country in 1120. It is curious to compare the account of that 
campaign with our own experience of the manner in which the tribes 
fought at Souakim and on the Nile. The same headlong rush of 
spearmen, the same disdain of fire-arm and wound, the same necessity 
for square formation; one change, however, the 60 or 70 years had 
brought about. In 1820 the Dongola horse was to be found in large 
numbers along this part of the Nile; he is now a rare animal. The 
Turk soon found that the mounted Shagghiea was too nimble a foe for 
