Page:Africa by Élisée Reclus, Volume 1.djvu/166

 downwards on the ground and sham death; the buffalo sniffs round the body for some minutes and then goes away without touching it. The Shilluks believe in the supernatural, but pay little attention to it. They worship an ancestor whom they consider to be both a god and the creator of all things; they invoke the spirits of the stream and wash in its holy water, but only in fear and trembling speak of the spirits of the dead, which hover in the air and pass into the bodies of animals and trunks of trees. The throne does not pass in direct descent from father to son, but to the sister’s child or to some other relative on the female side. Until the new king has been proclaimed the corpse of his predecessor remains enclosed in his tokul ; his daughters are forbidden to marry, and confined in a village set apart for the purpose.

The town of Fashoda, established by the Egyptian Government in 1867, as the capital of its province of Bahr-el-Abiad, is in Shilluk territory. Although the residence of the Shilluk king, it was at that time the village of Denab, a mere group of straw huts; it is now an imposing square fortress surrounded by palings, depôts, and enclosures; but at the beginning of 1884 it was a city of the dead, the war having caused the people to quit their dwellings. Here the Egyptian Government used to send those condemned to perpetual exile. Fashoda occupies a good strategic position on the left bank of the Nile, at the great bend which it describes in its northern course beyond the Bahr-ez-Zaraf and Sobat junction. The confluence itself is defended east by the post of Takufikiyah, so-called in honour of the Khedive, and west by the village of Sobat, established officially with a view to overlook the Negro slave-dealers. Kaka, recently the chief slave market of the Upper Nile, is the most important place in the Shilluk country ; it lies on the left bank of the river, near the northern frontier.