He hated them with a bitterness beyond all language, as interferers with the traffic in _djellabs_, as the slave-dealers term their human wares; and for the losses he had sustained at their hands, like Osman Digna, when some of his dhows were captured on their voyage to Jeddah by British cruisers; and ultimately even Suakim became so closely watched by the latter that his caravan leaders had to deposit their captives by twos and threes at lonely places on the shore of the Red Sea, to transmit them across it when occasion served. Then when he came to speak of the Anglo-Egyptian slave convention, which was the ruin of the traders in human flesh, he gnashed his teeth, his black eye-balls shot fire, and he looked as if with difficulty he restrained himself from pinning Skene to the sand with his lance. It was the ruin of the Soudan, he declared, as the Christians only wished to liberate all slaves that they might become their property. He had struggled against this, he said, with voice and sword till the summer of 1881, when the Mahdi, Mahommed Achmet Shemseddin, issuing from his cave on the White Nile, proclaimed himself the New Prophet. Then he cast his lot with the latter, and in two years after served with him at the capture of El Obeid, and the slaughter of the armies of Hicks and Baker, when they won together a holy influence and a military reputation, which were greatly enhanced by subsequent conflicts and events. Such was the stern, unpleasant, and uncompromising individual in whose hands Malcolm Skene found himself retained as a hostage, in a trifling way it seemed, for Zebehr-Rahama-Gymme-Abel, better known as Zebehr Pasha, whilom the friend of General Gordon, but in reality the most slippery, savage, and bitter enemy of Britain in the present time. And full of the heavy thoughts his entire circumstances forced upon him, somewhere about the first of November he found himself, with his escort, approaching a zereba which had been one of the headquarters of Zebehr, but latterly assigned to his kinsman, Sheikh Moussa, and the very aspect of it made even the stout heart of Malcolm Skene sink within him, as he had been prepared for a tented camp, or wigwam-like village, but not for the place in which he found himself, and which was one of those described by Dr. Schweinfurth, the great German traveller, when he visited Zebehr Pasha a short time before. CHAPTER XLII. THE ZEREBA OF SHEIKH MOUSSA.