who had been in the service of Zaid Zaid, Imaum of Zanzibar, that corroborated this statement of Karissa in every particular respecting the transit of slaves across the table land of Abyssinia, from Sennaar to Lamoo on the Indian Ocean, and so to the market of Zanzibar. I was, however, more interested in the account I received of the white people, and which was as exaggerated a relation, as many of the reports received by some travellers respecting the Doko dwarfs. To retail here all the absurd nonsense that Karissa entertained me with would be sadly misappropriating space, but I could gather from the reports that a singular race of men live in the most jealous seclusion, in a large desert-surrounded table land, similar in many respects to that of Abyssinia. That they were civilized was evident, from the fact of their writing being said to be quite different from the Geez, and it is not a nation just emerged from barbarism that would possess a knowledge of such an abstruse art as that of writing. As to the tale of their being cannibals, I recollected that even at the present day the very same report is entertained, and believed by the Negroes around Kordofan of European habits, and that we ourselves are supposed by them to be cannibals. This is, in fact, a charge so easily made, and serves so admirably to heighten the horrible, in a picture of a barbarous people drawn by an imaginative mind, that even among modern travellers we find an inclination to spread such rumours, without any examination as to their correctness, and sometimes, from a hasty conclusion, or an error in interpretation, without any foundation whatever. In this manner, a stigma of cannibalism has been attached to the Dankalli, but which only shows how careful travellers ought to be before they promulgate such strange and absurd stories.[11] Nothing can be positively asserted; but I believe, myself, that we are on the eve of a most interesting ethnological and geographical discovery, that will at once afford a solution to all the strange and improbable accounts which have reached us respecting the inhabitants of Central Africa. What we hear of dwarfs, cannibals, and communities of monkeys, may, perhaps, prove to be merely a muddied stream of information, conveyed to us through the medium of ignorant and barbarous tribes; but which may have a foundation of an unexpected character, in the existence of a nation in this situation; which, almost physically separated from the rest of the world by impassable deserts and unnavigable rivers, has continued in its original integrity that perfect condition of society which, once general, then almost extinguished, evidently preceded the barbarism from which the present transition state has emerged, and which I believe to be gradually progressing to the re-attainment of the previous excellence of the primeval social institutions.