They have all been slaves, some to within a year or two, their histories demonstrating the efficacy of the government’s repression of slave dealing, even within the country, and in the second and third of the cases I give, the proof is striking. Several have very similar stories. They remember little of their capture, in remote provinces of the Sudan, as all were then boys of ten or twelve at most. One remembers that his father was killed. Four practically began life in Jedda, where they were first set to tend camels, then sent with the pearling fleet up and down the coast, even as far as Aden and Jibûti, in French Somaliland. At this time several formed friendships which induced them to foregather in my village when they were free. After years in the pearling fleet, three were sold in Suakin to “Arabs” of the Atbara district, many miles inland, over the mountains and desert, towards Berber. A fourth reached the same tribe by a more adventurous way. Peacefully tending camels for his master near Handûb, in the Red Sea hills, in ignorance of the vicinity of war, he suddenly found himself in the midst of battle[13], and, after receiving a stray bullet through the leg, was carried off by Osman Digna’s dervishes in their flight to Tokar. After the capture of Tokar in 1891, this being the conclusion of the war on the Red Sea coast, he was sold to pearlers from Masawa, finally, at Suakin, to the tribe from the Atbara. Two others, who had been born in the service of one master in the above-mentioned district, are here. One explained his presence, across hundreds of miles of desert and the Red Sea mountains, by stating that he had heard that his “brother” was doing well in Suakin. There was no romantic desert flight, he took the train near Berber, with his master’s concurrence, possibly with his assistance also. His owner had said simply, “I have all the slaves I can manage, go or stay as you like.” Such a permission, given freely to two slaves of the most valuable kind, about thirty years old, of powerful physique, intelligent, docile and industrious, is emphatic evidence of the impossibility of sale nowadays. If a secret sale could have been effected, the sacrifice would have been too great, even for an old man anxious to lay up treasure in Heaven.