I Was Fully Prepared For Some Difficulty, But I Trusted That When Once On The March I Should Be Able To Get Them Under Discipline. Among My People Were Two Blacks:

One, "Richarn," already described as having been brought up by the Austrian Mission at Khartoum; the other, a boy of twelve years old, "Saat." As these were the only really faithful members of the expedition, it is my duty to describe them.

Richarn was an habitual drunkard, but he had his good points; he was honest, and much attached to both master and mistress. He had been with me for some months, and was a fair sportsman, and being of an entirely different race to the Arabs, he kept himself apart from them, and fraternised with the boy Saat.

Saat was a boy that would do no evil; he was honest to a superlative degree, and a great exception to the natives of this wretched country. He was a native of "Fertit," and was minding his father's goats, when a child of about six years old, at the time of his capture by the Baggera Arabs. He described vividly how men on camels suddenly appeared while he was in the wilderness with his flock, and how he was forcibly seized and thrust into a large gum sack, and slung upon the back of a camel. Upon screaming for help, the sack was opened, and an Arab threatened him with a knife should he make the slightest noise. Thus quieted, he was carried hundreds of miles through Kordofan to Dongola on the Nile, at which place he was sold to slave-dealers, and taken to Cairo to be sold to the Egyptian government as a drummer-boy. Being too young he was rejected, and while in the dealer's hands he heard from another slave, of the Austrian Mission at Cairo, that would protect him could he only reach their asylum. With extraordinary energy for a child of six years old, he escaped from his master, and made his way to the Mission, where he was well received, and to a certain extent disciplined and taught as much of the Christian religion as he could understand. In company with a branch establishment of the Mission, he was subsequently located at Khartoum, and from thence was sent up the White Nile to a Mission-station in the Shillook country. The climate of the White Nile destroyed thirteen missionaries in the short space of six months, and the boy Saat returned with the remnant of the party to Khartoum, and was re-admitted into the Mission. The establishment was at that time swarming with little black boys from the various White Nile tribes, who repaid the kindness of the missionaries by stealing everything they could lay their hands upon. At length the utter worthlessness of the boys, their moral obtuseness, and the apparent impossibility of improving them, determined the chief of the Mission to purge his establishment from such imps, and they were accordingly turned out.

Enter page number Go  Previous Next
Page 62 of 343
Words from 31922 to 32424 of 178435