"On returning to Cairo (April 21) I met Dr. Leo Reinisch, Professor of Egyptology to the University of Vienna, who, with his wife, had been living for some months in Abyssinia, and on the Upper Nile. He gave all manner of details, and detailed that the slave-trade was assuming an importance which it never had in the days of the ex-Khedive. His account of it, indeed, was disgraceful to the Riaz Ministry. The slave-traders, no longer organized to invade the country, pitch their zaribahs, or armed camps, upon the borders of the man-hunting lands, Dar-Fur, Kordofan, the Niam-Niam country; Monbuttoland, and the whole valley of the Bahr el Ghazál. In these lands, nominally Egyptian, they buy the kidnapped negroes offered to them, and march them through the oasis, and along the Nile at parts where there are no guards. From the terminus of the main depôt, Siwah, the victims are sent to Cairo and Alexandria, and when these lines are dangerous, they are passed through the Oases of Augila to Tunis and Tripoli. Besides the Soudan, there is another branch, the Habesh or Abyssinian, which includes the Galla tribes and the peoples of Shoa, Gouga, Gurágue, and Godjam, whose chief Ras Adal has made his name infamous. The Habesh market does not include the 'Abid' (negroes proper) from the South and West of Khartum. At Zayla the notorious Governor, Abu Beker,[2] and his fifty sons (the former now charged with the foul murder of M. Lucereau), work the Galla mine to great profit. This trade resembles the _almost_ extinct Caucasian, especially the Circassian, so far that parents and relatives sell their children and kinsfolk. It is a small but constant supply of a high-priced article, equally in demand throughout Arabia and Egypt. It requires no apparatus, no outlay of men and money; and, consequently, to suppress it by closing the main artery, the Red Sea, may be pronounced practically impossible. It can only be destroyed by abolishing the demand. "Before leaving Cairo, Professor Smith, in a private conversation, recounted to her Majesty's Consul-General, who had never heard of the revival, what he had seen and gathered during his excursion. I reported the new tactics, of which the Foreign Office could know nothing, in three official letters to her Majesty's Government (April 27, May 3 and 11). I proposed what I then considered easy and efficacious means of suppressing this disgrace to humanity. The unmanageable duplicity shown in the after proceedings of the Riaz Ministry, and the adoption of plausible measures which serve only to mislead the public, have, since that time, compelled me to change my views, to expect nothing from compromise and to advocate whole measures.