What struck me most in this town is its well-kept and green appearance; the streets are wide, the houses in good repair and surrounded with trees (mostly serrahs). There are none of the hovels, the broken-down walls, the heaps of refuse so often found in Sudanese cities, except perhaps on the south side, where, at the time of my passing through the town, a group of Fellatas had set up a camp of dirty little straw huts in which men, women, children, and cattle sprawled in an indiscriminate heap. The sultan Ali Dinar, who had spent part of his youth in the valley of the Nile with the Khalif of the Mahdists, had acquired there a taste for green trees, fine houses, and broad avenues. His palace had been carefully constructed. The principal building, a rectangular white house two stories high, surmounted by a terrace, opened northwards on to a garden planted with palms and lemon-trees. The rooms were large and comfortable, and from the second storey windows the Sultan could see not only the whole of his palace and his capital, but also a vast panorama over the surrounding plain, the valley of the Wadi El Ko, the mountains of Kebkebia, and even the Djebel Marra, whose imposing mass can be seen when the sky is very clear, more than 70 miles to the south-west. Other houses, less sumptuous, but more original because local in style, equally attract one’s notice in the interior of this palace, in which one loses one’s self in a labyrinth of walls, courtyards, and outbuildings. These houses are large round huts with simple clay walls, but whose roofs, admirably thatched, are often connected by long wide verandahs. These were the apartments of the princesses, light, roomy, and comfortable. Ali Dinar’s æsthetic preoccupations have been rare among Sudanese monarchs, but it must be admitted that in order to embellish his palace and his capital he had all but ruined his kingdom, reducing half the population to a sort of semi-slavery, filling his harem with concubines, distributing his subjects’ cattle among his favourites and the Arab merchants who brought him precious merchandise and weapons and ammunition sent by the Senoussists. He dreamed of extending his empire, and lent a too ready ear to the preachers of the Holy War, who, under the ægis of the Grand Senoussi and the Grand Turk, dreamed of driving French and British out of Africa. It was with him as with so many other despots: he fell through pride. Had he shown more wisdom and diplomacy he might well have been reigning still in Dar Four.