Page:The Romance of Isabel, Lady Burton.djvu/701

"Kartoum, August 8, 1878.

"My dear Burton,

"Please date, or rather put address on your letters. Thanks for yours of July 4, received to-day. I am very sorry Mrs. Burton is not well, but hope England has enabled her to regain her health. My arrangement is letter for letter. If you write, I will answer. I wish you could undertake the Government of Zeyla, Harar, and Berberah, and free me of the bother. Why cannot you get two years' leave from F. O., then write (saying it is my suggestion) to H.H., and offer it? I could give, say, £5,000 a year from London to your Government. Do do something to help me, and do it without further reference to me; you would lift a burthen off my shoulders. I have now to stay at Kartoum for the finances. I am in a deplorable state. I have a nasty revolt of Slandralus at Bahr Gazelle, which will cost me some trouble; I mean not to fight them, but to blockade them into submission. I am now hard at work against the slave caravans; we have caught fifteen in two months, and I hope by a few judicious hangings to stop their work. I hanged a man the other day for making a eunuch without asking H.H.'s leave. Emin Effendi, now Governor of Equator Province, is Dr. Sneitzer; but he is furious if you mention it, and denies that is his name to me; he declares he is a Turk. There is something queer about him which I do not understand; he is a queer fellow, very cringing in general, but sometimes bursts out into his natural form.