About 800 Men Received Payment Of Cattle In Advance; The Next Day They
Had All Absconded With Their Cows, Having
Departed during the night.
This was a planned affair to "spoil the Egyptians:" a combination had
been entered into some
Months before by the Madi and Shooa tribes, to
receive payment and to abscond, but to leave the Turks helpless to
remove their stock of ivory. The people of Mahommed Wat-el-Mek were in a
similar dilemma; not a tusk could be delivered at Gondokoro.
This was not my affair. The greater portion of Ibrahim's immense store
of ivory had been given to him by Kamrasi; I had guaranteed him a
hundred cantars (10,000 lbs.) should he quit Obbo and proceed to the
unknown south; in addition to a large quantity that he had collected and
delivered at Gondokoro in the past year, he had now more than three
times that amount. Although Kamrasi had on many occasions offered the
ivory to me, I had studiously avoided the acceptance of a single tusk,
as I wished the Turks to believe that I would not mix myself up with
trade in any form, and that my expedition had purely the one object that
I had explained to Ibrahim when I first won him over on the road to
Ellyria more than two years ago, "the discovery of the Albert lake."
With a certain number of presents of first class forty-guinea rifles and
guns, &c. &c., to Ibrahim, I declared my intention of starting for
Gondokoro.
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