we lingered lovingly around hippo camp for two more days, moving to other lagoons and overflows of the river with the launch, and striking out inland in search of the great herd of elephants. but although their recent presence was on all sides proclaimed by snapped-off trees and trampled ground, and broad lanes cut through the grass, we saw none of them; and a tribe of natives who helped to carry home a variety of buck one afternoon, informed us upon expert authority that the whole herd had been alarmed by the arrival of strangers and the sound of firing, and had retired three days' journey from the river's bank. these natives—of the lado enclave—were gentleman-like folk, and i parleyed long with them upon their affairs. they were stark naked and very dignified, with graceful athletic bodies, long tapering 189 well-bred hands, and bright keen eyes. the local chief exhibited all these characteristics in a superior degree, and his natural preeminence was recognized with instantaneous obedience by his followers. we loaded them with gifts. first, quantities of meat and hides; then chocolate all round—they love sweet things—three pieces of sugar for each, at least one empty bottle per man, and tin pots and card-board boxes almost without limit. the chief showed a fine taste in all these things, and annexed at once in the imperial style whatever took his fancy, to whomsoever it belonged. i cast about for some means of doing him especial honour, and luckily remembered that i had bought a japanese kimono for a dressing-gown in passing through port said on the journey out. with this he was forthwith enrobed, and i must say he assumed the flowing garment with that easy grace and natural self-possession which are the gifts of a wilderness life. thus the fabrics of cathay were by the enterprise of europe introduced into the heart of africa.
when, finally, with much reluctance we left this attractive place and pushed off determinedly into the stream, we lost no time in 190 making nimule. steaming throughout the night and all next day along a broad flood contained by high and healthy slopes—now clothed with forest, now with waving grass—we approached, at about four in the afternoon, the mountains beneath which is the administrative station of nimule. hitherto the course of the nile since it left the albert lake had been smooth and open—a broad, steady-flowing river everywhere navigable to vessels of not more than four feet draught. but at nimule, after a reach of more than a hundred and seventy miles of unobstructed waterway, the river turns a sharp right angle and enters a long succession of granite gorges, through which it plunges in ceaseless cataract for a hundred and twenty miles. it is here at the head of these rapids that one of the great reservoirs of the upper nile must some day be constructed. "i spent hours," said sir william willcocks, the "practical mystic" of hydraulic engineering, "looking at the site, and seeing in a vision a great regulating work of the future." and indeed the exact scientific control of the whole vast system of central african waters, of the levels of every lake, of the flow of every channel, from month to 191 month and from day to day throughout the year, is a need so obvious and undisputed as to leave argument unemployed.
the change in the character of the river separated us finally from our flotilla. from nimule to gondokoro we must again proceed by land, and the swift and easy progress of the last few days must be exchanged for the steady grind of marches. it was this stage which had always been painted to me as the most dangerous and unhealthy in our whole journey, and i had pictured to myself eight days of toil through swamp and forest amid miasma and mosquitoes. these anticipations were not sustained. of the disadvantages of the track along the river bank i cannot speak; but the upper road over the hills is certainly excellent and healthy, and runs throughout over firm dry undulations of a bright, breezy, scrub-covered country.
at nimule we touched the telegraph wire again, and from the reuter's accumulations which i studied, i learned that parliament would not meet till the 19th of january. this gave another ten days' more rope, and i began to realize how much the spirit of these wonderful lands had taken possession of me, for it 192 was only with the greatest reluctance and difficulty, that i forced myself to continue my homeward journey without first turning back with the launch and circumnavigating lake albert. no exertion or inconvenience seemed too great to win a few more glimpses of these enchanted seas and gardens, on which i may perhaps not look again, but from whose spell i can never be free. porters to be fed from day to day, the sirdar's steamer waiting at the soudan frontier, public meetings looming heavily in the far-off distance, drove me onward; and with feelings of keen and genuine regret we addressed ourselves to the march to gondokoro.
fording the asua.
this was accomplished uneventfully in six stages, three of which were double marches. the country was pleasant and healthy, the scenery imposing, and, under a fierce sun, the air was cool. each morning we started before dawn, and by noon had camped by the side of one of the tributary rivers or streams which flow into the nile. of these the asua was the most important, and the picture of the long safari fording it and coming into camp among the palm-trees of the southern bank is one which lingers pleasantly in my memory. 193 but this i must say—somehow after nimule the charm was broken, and none of the regions through which the traveller passes in the long-drawn descent of the nile revive in any degree those delicious sensations of wonder and novelty which are associated with the great lakes and the kingdoms of uganda, usoga, and unyoro, to say nothing of what i have not been fortunate enough to see—toro, ankole, the semliki, and the mountains of the moon.
at the end of the sixth day we arrived at gondokoro. the last march had been long and scorching. the moisture seemed to have gone from the air, and the vegetation, abundant though it was, seemed parched and stunted. the approaches to gondokoro are beset by a herd of three hundred elephants of peculiar ill-fame. nearly all the eligible tuskers have been killed. the females and young bulls are fierce and wary, and, taught by frequent contact with the white man, and protected by the sacred game laws, exercise a lawless and tyrannical power over the whole region. on every side their depredations are to be seen. great trees pushed over in careless sport, native plantations trampled into 194 ruin, the roads rendered precarious for the traveller, the mails often interrupted for days at a time, and occasional loss of life, are the features of this domination. and it seems likely to last a long time, for i was informed that the young bulls would not be sufficiently grown for about forty years, and even then, as the two white officers in the station are not allowed to shoot more than one elephant apiece each year, the nuisance will only gradually be abated.
rogue elephants are of course fair game at any time, and the day before we arrived at gondokoro, the young civil officer of the station had encountered one in a manner which he was scarcely likely to forget. for, having pursued this evil-doer for some time, he at last got into an excellent position, and was about to fire at a distance of thirty yards when suddenly the elephant, without even trumpeting rushed furiously upon him, and, paying no attention to the two heavy bullets which struck him in the head, chased the officer twice round an uncommonly small bush; and then, distracted by the spectacle of the native gun-bearer in flight, turned off after this new prey, and, overtaking the poor wretch, smashed 195 him to pieces with one blow of his terrible trunk. "cet animal est très méchant; quand on l'attaque, il se défend." we reached the bungalow, which serves as the seat of government, in time to see the tusks of this man-slayer, who had died of his wounds, brought in by the tribe whose plantations he had so often ravaged.
gondokoro, like most of the names which figure so imposingly upon the african map, is not a numerously populated town. there are about six houses and a number of native huts. there is, however, a telegraph station, a prison, a court-house, and the lines of a company of native police and king's african rifles. here the nile again becomes navigable, and offers an unbroken waterway open to large vessels until the shabluka cataract is reached, a hundred miles below khartoum and fifteen hundred miles from gondokoro. and here at the river's bank, seen through a tracery of palms, were the white funnel and superstructure of the sirdar's steamer with all the letters and newspapers; and which, instead of pursuing us across uganda, had "come through the other way."
"had come through the other way"—it is 196 an easy phrase to write: but how much it signifies in the modern history of africa! ten or eleven years ago this journey which i was now able to make so easily, so prosperously, so comfortably, would have been utterly impossible. the dervish empire, stretching from wady halfa or abu hamed to wadelai, interposed a harsh barrier which nothing but a stricken field could sweep away; and these long reaches of the nile which now bore a fleet of fifty steamers were silent in the embrace of a devastating barbarism. a grim slaughter which had strewn the sands of kerreri, twelve hundred miles to the north, with jibba-clad corpses "like snow-drifts" had blasted a passage, and the nile was free.
embarked at gondokoro we passed out of the sphere of the colonial office into the domain of that undefined joint authority which regulates the soudan, which flies two flags side by side on every public building, and which you can only correspond with through the british foreign office.
the belgian officials at lado.
gondokoro.
henceforward our journey was comfortable, and regular. yet though i had no official work to do and was merely coming home the shortest way, i could not traverse the soudan 197 without the keenest interest. when one has started from cairo and padded up the nile to wady halfa, crossed the desert railway to the atbara, marched thence two hundred miles to the battle of omdurman, one feels one has seen something of the nile. yet now we had followed it the other way from its source for nearly five hundred miles, and yet twelve hundred more intervened before even omdurman was reached; and as the mighty and peerless river unrolled its length and immemorial history, the feelings of reverence, without which no traveller can drink its sweet waters, grew in intensity.
i yield to no one in recognition of the constructive and reconstructive work which sir reginald wingate and his able officers have, with scanty means and in spite of grave military dangers, wrought in the soudan. yet it is not possible to descend the nile continuously from its source at ripon falls without realizing that the best lies behind one. uganda is the pearl. the nile province and the lado enclave present splendid and alluring panoramas. even the march from nimule to gondokoro is through a fertile and inspiring region. but thereafter 198 the beauty dies out of the landscape and the richness from the land. we leave the regions of abundant rainfall, of equatorial luxuriance, of docile peoples, of gorgeous birds and butterflies and flowers. we enter stern realms of sinister and forbidding aspect, where nature is cruel and sterile, where man is fanatical and often rifle-armed. cultivation—nay, vegetation, is but a strip along the river bank: and even there thorn-bushes and prickly aloes are its chief constituents. we enter two successive deserts as contrasted in their character, as redoubtable in their inhospitality, as dante's circles of the inferno: the desert of sudd and the desert of sand.
review at khartoum.
soudan government steamer "dal."
about a hundred miles from gondokoro the white nile enters and spills itself in a vast and appalling swamp. of the action of this tremendous sponge, whether beneficial in regulating the flow, or harmful in wasting the water through evaporation, nothing need here be said. but its aspect is at once so dismal and so terrifying that to travel through it is a weird experience. our steamer, with the favouring current, made at least seven miles an hour, and, as the moon was full, we travelled night and day. for 199 three days and three nights we were continuously in this horrible swamp into which the whole of the united kingdom could be easily packed. by day from the roof of the high pilot-house a commanding view revealed hour after hour, in every direction, one uninterrupted ocean of floating vegetation spreading to far horizons. the papyrus-plant is in itself a beautiful, graceful, and venerable thing. to travel through the sudd, is to hate it for evermore. rising fifteen feet above the level of the water, stretching its roots twenty or even thirty feet below, and so matted and tangled together that elephants can walk safely upon its springy surface, papyrus is the beginning and end of this melancholy world. for hundreds of miles nothing else is to be perceived—not a mountain-ridge blue on the horizon, scarcely a tree, no habitation of man, no sign of beast. the silence is broken only by the croaking of innumerable frog armies, and the cry of dreary birds.
the vigorous operations of the sudd-cutters have opened, and the constant traffic of steamers has preserved and improved, a channel about a hundred yards wide, winding by loops and corkscrews through the swamp. the river 200 presents a depth of thirty feet along this course, and greater vessels could thread its length for nearly a thousand miles. the navigation is intricate and peculiar. indeed, it would seem to be an art by itself. no effort is made by the arab pilots, who alone are employed, to avoid collisions with the banks. on the contrary, they rely upon them as an essential feature of their management of the steamer. the vessel bumps regularly at almost every corner from one cushion of sudd to the other, or plunges its nose into the reeds and waits for the currents to carry its stern round, bumps again and recovers its direction. sometimes where the twists were very sharp we would turn completely round, not once but two or three times, and our movements round an s-curve were even more complicated. the bumps occasionally swept us out of our chairs and sent us sprawling on the deck. in this strange fashion we waltzed along at full speed for about seventy or eighty hours.
meanwhile the nile was accomplishing its destiny. its vast tributary rivers, the sobat and the bahr-el-ghazal, came to reinforce its flow. the miles spread out behind us in a long succession of hundreds. at length the sudd 201 expanses begin to contract. distant mountains rise against the steel-blue sky in serrated silhouette, and gradually draw in upon the river. islands of earth and trees, peaks of sharp rock break here and there the awful monotony of waving reeds. at last the banks become firm and clear-cut walls of yellow sand, fringed in places with palms and shady trees, and everywhere bristling with undergrowth of thorns. we leave the wilderness of moisture, we approach the wilderness of drought. but first, in a middle region, vast areas of dusty scrub-covered plains, not wholly incapable of cultivation in the rainy season, supporting always flocks and herds, now flank both sides of the river. the camel caravans pad slowly across them under the blaze and glitter of the heat. the mirage begins to twist and blur the landscape with deceptive waters. at intervals of forty or fifty miles are the stations of the soudan government, each trim and regular with its public buildings, its storehouses, the lines of beehive huts of its garrison, a tangle of native sailing-craft, and always, or nearly always, one or two white gunboats of war-time days now turned policemen of the river. 202
thus we reach in time fashoda—now called kodok for old sake's sake; and here are clusters of shillooks who (by request) stand pensively on one leg in their natural attitude, and smart companies of soudanese troops and british officers, civil and military—the whole clear-cut under sun-blaze dry light, veiled only in dancing dust-devils piteously whipped by strong hot winds. all this was like a piece of the omdurman campaign to me—the old familiar soudan, so often made known to british minds by pen, pencil, and photograph during nearly twenty years of war, unfolded itself feature by feature. yet we were still five hundred miles south of khartoum!
a sheluk at kodok (fashoda).
at meshra-er-zeraf we stopped for two days to shoot, by the sirdar's invitation, in the extensive game reserve, and were fortunate in securing a buffalo and various antelope. we wandered through a harsh country, of white sand and tussocks of coarse grass, more grey than green, with leafless black thorn-trees densely tangled; yet it seemed full of game. in three hours' walk on the second morning i shot a fine waterbuck, two reed-bucks, and two of a beautiful herd of roan antelope, who walked slowly down to water past our ambuscade. 203 and, be it remembered, that the pleasure and excitement of such sport are in these lands always heightened by the possibility that at any moment the hunters may come upon game of much more serious quality—lion or buffalo; so that no one cares to be more than a few yards from his heavy rifle or give his mind wholly to the buck he stalks. surely they are perverse, unenterprising folk who spend fortunes each year in preserving with so much artificial care, and to the inconvenience of other dwellers in a small island, well-counted herds of more or less tame deer, when in a month, and for less expense than the year's rent of their forests, they could pursue wild animals of every kind in their natural haunts and gain experiences that would last them all their lives.
i was so much elated by this jolly morning's sport and the near approach of civilized conditions—for after all, contrast is an element in pleasure—that i permitted myself to rejoice at the safe and happy outcome of this long journey, and to exult in our complete immunity from serious accident or illness or even fever. how extravagant were the accounts of the dangers of african travel! how easy to 204 avoid the evil chances of the road! reasonable precautions, steady exercise, regular quinine—were these not in themselves the guarantees of safety? thus i reckoned, and with specious reasons, but in a bad hour. we were not yet at our journey's end.
twenty-four hours' steaming from meshra-er-zeraf brought us near khartoum. the character of the country was unchanged. yellow sand-slopes drank at the nile brim; thorn-scrub fringed the river on either side; but date-palms mingled even more frequently and numerously with the vegetation, and brown mud-built villages with brown mud-coloured populations multiplied as the miles slipped swiftly by. at length a solitary majestic tree, beneath whose spacious branches and luxuriant foliage a hundred persons might have found shelter from the relentless sun—gordon's tree—advertised us of the proximity of khartoum. soon on the one bank came into view the vast mud labyrinth of omdurman, with forests of masts rising along the shore, and on the other, among palm-groves ever clustering thicker, sprang the blue and pink and crimson minarets of new khartoum. khartoum—the new khartoum, risen from its ruins in wealth and beauty—a 205 smiling city sitting like a queen throned at the confluence of the niles, the heart and centre of a far-reaching and formidable authority, disclosed herself to the traveller's eye. sharp to the right turns the steamer, leaving the dull placid waters of the sovereign river we have so long followed, and shouldering a more turbulent current of clearer water, swings up-stream along its noble feudatory, the blue nile. and passing by the side of high stone embankments crowned by palms, the steamer enters into a modern oriental port and city, and is soon surrounded by its palaces, its mosques, its warehouses and its quays.
the palace, khartoum.
nearly ten years have passed since the dervish domination was irretrievably shattered on the field of omdurman, and every year has been attended by steady and remarkable progress in every sphere of governmental activity in every province of the soudan. order has been established, and is successfully, though precariously, maintained even in the remotest parts of kordofan. the railway has reached the southern bank of the blue nile, connects khartoum with cairo and with the red sea, waits only for the construction of a bridge to cross the river and enter the fertile 206 regions of the ghezireh. a numerous fleet of steamers maintains swift and regular communication along the great waterways. the revenue has risen from a few thousands a year in 1899 to considerably over a million pounds in 1907. improved methods of agriculture have increased the wealth of the country; the prevention of massacre and famine has begun to restore its population. slavery has been abolished, and without affronting the religion or seriously disturbing the customs of the people, a measure of education and craftsmanship has been introduced.
these great changes which are apparent throughout the whole soudan are nowhere presented in so striking and impressive form as in the capital. a spacious palace, standing in a beautiful garden, has risen from the ruins where gordon perished. broad thoroughfares lighted by electricity, and lined with excellent european shops, lead with geometrical precision through the city. a system of steam tramways in connection with ferry boats, patronized chiefly by the natives, renders communication easy throughout khartoum, and between khartoum, omdurman, and halfyah. a semi-circle of substantial barracks, arranged upon a defensive 207 scheme, protects the landward approaches. the gordon college hums with scholarly activity—moslem and christian, letters or crafts; and seven thousand soldiers of all dress march past the british and egyptian flags on occasions of ceremony.
george scrivings.
yet neither these inspiring facts—the more impressive by contrast with my memories of ten years before—nor the gracious hospitality of the sirdar—more responsible than any other man for the whole of this tremendous task of reconstruction and revival—were to prevent me from taking away a sombre impression of khartoum. as our steamer approached the landing-stage i learned that my english servant, george scrivings, had been taken suddenly ill, and found him in a condition of prostration with a strange blue colour under his skin. good doctors were summoned. the hospital of khartoum, with all its resources, was at hand. there appeared no reason to apprehend a fatal termination. but he had been seized by a violent internal inflammation, the result of eating some poisonous thing which we apparently had escaped, and died early next morning after fifteen hours' illness, with almost every symptom of asiatic cholera. 208
too soon, indeed, had i ventured to rejoice. africa always claims its forfeits; and so the four white men who had started together from mombasa returned but three to cairo. a military interment involves the union of the two most impressive rituals in the world. the day after the battle of omdurman it fell to my lot to bury those soldiers of the 21st lancers, who had died of their wounds during the night. now after nine years, in very different circumstances, from the other end of africa, i had come back to this grim place where so much blood has been shed, and again i found myself standing at an open grave, while the yellow glare of the departed sun still lingered over the desert, and the sound of funeral volleys broke its silence.
the remainder of our journey lay in tourist lands, and the comfortable sleeping-cars of the desert railway, and the pleasant passenger steamers of the wady haifa and assouan reach soon carried us prosperously and uneventfully to upper egypt; and so to cairo, london, and the rest.
