The people of this portion of the Soudan between the coast and the Nile Valley, who do not own allegiance to the Khalifa, belong to the Morghani confraternity of Mohammedans; their young religious sheikh, a self-possessed, clever lad of about twenty, lives at Sawakin, and his influence amongst the tribes not affecting Mahdism is supreme. He is devoted to British interests, and no doubt in the present condition of affairs his co-operation will be of great value. The Egyptian Government instructed him to write to the sheikhs around Halaib and Mohammed Gol to insure our safety, and to this fact I am convinced we owe the immunity from danger we enjoyed, and the assistance given to us in penetrating inland from Mohammed Gol. The Morghani have the three cicatrices on either cheek, and as a confraternity they are not in the least fanatical, and are well disposed to Christians; very different to the Arabs we met in the Hadhramout, and very different to the Dervishes with whom they are on such hostile terms. While at Halaib I paid several visits to the wife and family of the mamour or governor. They were very civil always, and used to kiss me. They looked quite as unsettled in their airy brushwood arbours as if they had not resided there steadily for seven years. There were three huts about 12 feet by 8 feet, one being a kitchen. There is a brushwood fence all round, part having a shed for the stores and water jars. The wife is a Turk, and has one plain grown-up daughter. There was an old lady who made coffee, and a black maid slightly draped in a sheet once white, but now of a general deep grey, pure black in some parts. I liked getting coffee and ginger best. The first day I had to swallow, smiling, tea boiled and a little burnt. All the furniture I saw was a 3-foot bed, three Austrian chairs, a very common wooden table, and a little iron one with a new and tight pink cotton cover and petticoat to the ground. All was very clean but the maid. The kind lady thought her dwelling so superior to mine that she begged me to come and sleep in the bed with her in shelter from the wind; tents, she said, were only fit for men. I did not envy her her home in the drenching rain we had all night and half one day. She wore a string round under one arm, with seven or eight charms like good-sized pincushions or housewifes of different coloured silks.