The unfortunate Soliman, who was thus the victim of his own mischance, was the man who had saved my servant Mohammed when he had his encounter with the wild buffalo. Half the camp hastened to the ill-fated spot, to be enabled to testify to the accidental death of Soliman by his own hand. So quietly had he fallen that even my servant Osman, who was near, ascertained quite casually that he was dead; a dark mark, caused by the smoke from the powder, at the orifice of the gaping wound, showed that his gun had gone off while he was holding it. Sobbing and weeping, his friends and countrymen stood round his body, and even the stony-hearted cattle-stealers seemed as if, after all, they were not utterly devoid of all human emotion. One of them was touched with a strange remorse, the reason of which I afterwards discovered. It appeared that Soliman owed him a debt, which he declared he had paid; on the previous day, while Soliman had been emphatically persisting that the debt was discharged, his accuser, in his rage, cursed him with the heaviest imprecation he could command: “The dogs devour thee!” The disaster, therefore, was a manifest punishment from heaven; the man would indeed gladly have never uttered the curse, but yet he could not be reconciled with the dead. On the very next day, as we were about to start, another man shattered the upper part of his arm by carelessly taking his gun from a bush where he had laid it. We left the unlucky spot, and proceeded two miles further to the village of Kudy, also an old friend of the Turks, as the Khartoomers are everywhere termed by the natives. Here we made another halt, in order to pass the day in slaughtering some cattle, in feasting on beef and goat’s flesh, and in laying in a store of corn for our large party of bearers. [Sidenote: LEGAL AFFIDAVIT.] Here also a kind of affidavit or protocol, strictly conformable to Mohammedan rule, was taken of the previous day’s accident, in order to be able to produce legal evidence at Khartoom, where the deceased Soliman had left a wife and child. The chief part of this important business was performed by the Faki, who accompanied the party as private slave-dealers, enacting at the same time their legal character as scribes. After the protocol was drawn up, it was sealed, according to Oriental custom, by the agents who were present. This was not done without great prolixity and circumstantial debate. The formality of the document was curious; its opening words were: “Osman the agent asks Osman the servant of the lord Musyu the question: Where is Soliman?” Osman in his turn had to give an account of the accident: “As we were hunting in the thicket, I heard a shot,” and so on. They did not expect to be cross-examined; they did not look for even such mild reproach as the king gave Hamlet when he inquired, “Where’s Polonius?” but they considered it quite as well to keep up the old-established form.