How brutal was the African slave trade in the Arab world?
• The narrative of the last days of the Flatters mission, published in another column according to the text of the Paris Figaro, contains in its terribly dry detail suggestion of horror almost unprecedented. Most of the victims, as their names show, were spahis belonging to the race of the desert’s children; but they had long been accustomed to the comparatively civilized life of Algeria or the Senegal colonies, and their last struggle took place in a region known only to the wildest and fiercest of all nomad Arabs, who sweep through it on their way to carry off a sable booty of slaves from the black cities of the Niger, leaving behind them on their return a track marked with skeletons. In these latitudes time has stood still for uncounted thousands of years,–naught has been changed since the primeval sea dried up. It is all a dead and ruined world like the Moon.
