I am not concerned in writing the history of this unhappy region, which has been given up for years to be the prey of the vilest passions that human nature is capable of feeling, but by these allusions to what I personally know I am able to interest the reader in the true position of Emin Pasha. This solitary man was engaged in as impossible a task as was that of Gordon when he undertook and set out for Khartoum, in 1884, to rescue the garrisons of the Soudan. He did brave things, but the bravest portion of his story is when this earnest-minded man lives among these lost people, and has to endure seeing his subjects robbed and despoiled whenever any officer apprehends scarcity and resolves upon a raiding expedition. He knows exactly what will happen; he knows there will be indiscriminate shooting and looting, he knows there will be destruction of villages and decimation of the owners; that with the captive herds there will be long files of captive women and children, and a distribution of the spoil; and yet he dares do nothing to thwart these cruel and hard proceedings. How can he? He has no cloth or money to buy food for all his people. What answer can he make when they demand of him what they must do to live? Though the soil is gracious and repays labour, it is useless for him to point to it. They will grow cotton to clothe themselves, and cultivate gardens for kitchen vegetables, because no native understands these things; but grain for bread, and cattle for beef, the natives must yield to people nobler than themselves. He is the only man who can think of this work as a wrong, and as he has no force to compel men to think otherwise, he must needs endure this evil as he endures many others. Good government was therefore impossible. It was founded on blood and spoliation from the very beginning, and, like all other Governments which preceded it, that were created with similar views, it was decreed that it should perish utterly. As a fitting conclusion to this chapter, I append the following documents received from Sir Francis Grenfell, the Sirdar of Egypt. Those who love to trace effects to causes may find in these documents criminating proofs of that intercourse with the enemy which was maintained by the rebel officers. They explain what I have asserted. They prove conclusively that their object in proceeding to the Pasha at Tunguru, and imploring his forgiveness, promising to reinstate him in power, and begging him to introduce them to me, was for the purpose consummating the vile plot of betraying us into the hands of the Mahdists. Thanks to Jephson, who was “a chiel takin’ notes,” and to the clumsiness of their acts, Omar Saleh did not have the satisfaction of conveying that “other traveller who had come to Emin,” and whom he was so anxious to catch, for exhibition at Khartoum--which he may possibly regret more than I. LETTER FROM OSMAN DIGNA TO THE GOVERNOR-GENERAL, SUAKIM. “In the name of the Great God, &c.