The business of selection was completed after the haggling and confusion inseparable from a bargain among Orientals, and I spent most of the remainder of this and the following day in acquainting myself with the features of life in Gedaref. As this place is a type of the more important towns in the Soudan, in which Great Britain has a permanent interest, I hope the reader will tolerate the transcription of a few of my notes. The inhabitants number about eight thousand, and live—to use Mr. Dufton’s description—“in a number of scattered villages, the principal called Hellet-es-Sook, or the market town.”[14] The dwellings in this part of the Soudan and in Abyssinia are of the same construction, and I cannot better convey a conception of their simplicity and their appearance to those of my readers who have not seen them than by quoting the following passage from Mr. Dufton’s work:—“Some of the houses are built of sun-dried bricks and have flat roofs, but most of them” (almost all in Western Abyssinia) “are conical thatched huts. The latter are made in the following manner:—In the first place a circle of about twenty feet diameter is described on the ground and surrounded by strong posts, each a yard apart, which are interlaced with thin pliable branches of trees, the whole being covered outwardly with durrha stalks, tied together with the long grass common on the banks of the river. A roof is formed in skeleton on the ground. A number of beams, corresponding to that of the posts, are made to converge at the top, and are held in this position by concentric circles of plaited twigs; the whole being then raised to its position on the house, where it is fastened and made ready to receive the thatch of straw and grass. Not a nail or rivet of any kind is used in the construction of these buildings, and they are rendered totally impervious to the wet. Of course their disadvantage in comparison with mud houses is their liability to catch fire, one or two cases of which I have witnessed; but they are generally built at sufficient distance not to endanger others, and a house of this description is rebuilt in a day or two.”[15] Hence the scattered appearance of the huts. They cover a distance some five miles in length at Gedaref. These dwellings are called “tokhuls,” and I shall have occasion to allude to them frequently under that name. In the Soudan storks build their nests round the upper part of the roofs, and are not molested.