was conducted to the tent of the Pasha, by the ambassadors he had sent,
where he remained in audience with his Excellence a long time. When the
audience was finished, he and the personages he had before sent to the
Pasha were splendidly habited in the Turkish fashion, and presented with
horses, furnished with saddles and bridles embroidered with gold.[52]

It was on the morning following that the army reached the capital. We
marched in order of battle. The Pasha, accompanied by the Sultan of
Sennaar and his chief servants, in front. On approaching the city, the
army saluted this long wished for town, where they imagined that their
toils and privations would cease, at least for a time, with repeated and
continued volleys of cannon and musquetry, accompanied with shouts of
exultation. But these shouts subsided on a nearer approach, on finding
this once powerful city of Sennaar to be almost nothing but heaps of
ruins, containing in some of its quarters some few hundreds of habitable
but almost deserted houses. After the camp was pitched, and I had
refreshed myself with a little food, I took a walk about the town. At
almost every step I trod upon fragments of burnt bricks, among which are
frequently to be found fragments of porcelain, and sometimes marble. The
most conspicuous buildings in Sennaar are a mosque, and a large
brick palace adjoining it. The mosque, which is of brick, is in good
preservation; its windows are covered with well wrought bronze gratings,
and the doors are handsomely and curiously carved. The interior was
desecrated by uncouth figures of animals, portrayed upon the walls
with charcoal. This profanation had been perpetrated by the Pagan
mountaineers who inhabit the mountains thirteen days march south of
Sennaar, and who, at some period, not very long past, had taken
the town, and had left upon the walls of the mosque these tokens of
possession.