oases, and along the Nile, at a part where there are no guards. From the terminus depôt Siwah, slaves are sent to Cairo and Alexandria, and, when these lines are dangerous, through the Oases of Augila to Tunis and Tripoli. There would be no difficulty in controlling this trade. In reducing hundreds to tens, and tens to units, the necessary procedure cannot be taken by a retrograde and a remiss Egyptian Ministry, or by a staff of under-paid employés. "I have the honour to be. "Your Lordship's obedient servant, "R. F. BURTON." _Letter No._ 3. "Consulate, Trieste, May 11th, 1880. "MY LORD, "In my two letters, separate--Cairo, April 27th, and Cairo, May 3rd, which forwarded details of the slave-trade revival in Egypt and of the Wadái-Siwah line, which has temporarily taken the place of the Soudan trade, I neglected to mention another branch--which would require control, chiefly through the Red Sea. This is the Abyssinian, which includes the Galla tribes. The market resembles the Caucasian, especially the Circassian now extinct, in so far as parents sell their children, and relatives their kin. It is a small but constant supply of a high-priced article equally prized in Arabia and in Egypt. It required no apparatus, no expenditure of men and money, and consequently, to suppress it, will be a work of time and well-directed energy. During my return voyage from Alexandria, I met an old acquaintance (Dr. Geo. Reinisch), Professor of Egyptology to the University of Vienna, who with his wife had been living for some months in Abyssinia and the Upper Nile; he gave me all manner of details, and declared that the slave traffic is assuming an importance which it never had in the days of Ismail, the ex-Khedive. His account of it, indeed, is anything but creditable to the present administration of Egypt. Under Nubar Pasha or Sheríf Pasha, instant measures would be taken to abate the scandal, but the actual Ministry is too Moslem and too retrograde to interfere with the so-called patriarchal institution. "I have the honour to be, my Lord, "Your obedient servant, "R. F. BURTON." [Illustration: Richard F. Burton. In 1880.] He wrote, besides, a private letter to Lord Granville as follows:-- "The Ministry under Riaz Pasha is doing all it can to abolish Colonel Gordon's fine anti-slavery work for the last six years. They have sent up a certain Rauf Pasha, almost a black, who will have no weight whatever; and the Red Sea will be in a worse state than ever unless some measures are soon taken; and slave-trade is speedily reviving in the Soudan and the Red Sea. The Ministry wishes to drive out all foreigners, and this makes times in Egypt harder than ever. [Sidenote: _His Application to be made Slave Commissioner_.]