Kartoum has ingrafted all the vices of its northern society on the squalor and misery of its southern. A more miserable, filthy and unhealthy spot can hardly be imagined. Yet it is not uninteresting, for here, up to a recent period, was the “threshold of the unknown.” It has been the starting point of numberless Nile expeditions since the days of the Pharaohs. Mehemet Ali, first viceroy of Egypt, pushed his conquest of the Soudan, a little south of it in 1839. He found the climate so unhealthy that he established a penal colony a little way up the White Nile, banishment to which was considered equivalent to death. Says Sir Samuel Baker of Kartoum, on his second visit in 1869: “During my first visit in 1861, the population was 30,000. It is now reduced one-half, and nearly all the European residents have disappeared. And the change in the country between Berber and Kartoum is frightful. The river’s banks, formerly verdant with heavy crops, have become a wilderness. Villages, once crowded, have entirely disappeared. Irrigation has ceased. The nights, formerly discordant with the croaking of waterwheels, are now silent as death. Industry has vanished. Oppression has driven the inhabitants from the soil. It is all due to the Governor General of Soudan who, like a true Mohammedan, left his government to Providence while he increased the taxes. The population of the richest province of Soudan has fled oppression and abandoned the country. The greater portion have taken to the slave trade of the White Nile where, in their turn, they might trample on the rights of others, where, as they had been plundered, they might plunder.” [Illustration: MADEMOISELLE TINNE.]