Crossing Continents

In 1825, a young giraffe boarded a boat at Sennar, near the junction of the Blue and White Niles in the Sudan, and sailed for Paris. In the next year, also at Sennar, a Kurdish cavalry officer named Mahu Bey Urfali, who represented the Muhammad Ali Pasha regime of Egypt, died of smallpox in a military encampment. What was a Kurd from Urfa, now in southeastern Turkey, doing in the Sudan? Why did...