CONCLUSION
The Nile quest is practically ended. It may be safely said that every
important branch or affluent or lake-source of this the longest river
in Africa (very nearly the longest in the world) has been discovered,
named, and partially or completely mapped. The only portion of the
Nile basin which presents any noticeable blank on the map is the
unknown district--some say of swamp alternating with arid steppe--which
stretches like a tongue of white in our charts between the tributaries
of the Mountain Nile and the Giraffe on the west, and the affluents
of the Sobat on the east. In all probability whilst these lines are
written and printed this blank is being filled up by industrious
surveyors sent out by the Anglo-Egyptian government of the Sudan.
Fate has ordained that the entire basin of this river and its
tributaries (with the trifling exceptions of the upper waters of those
which rise within the political limits of Abyssinia, a portion of the
extreme source of the Nile (the Kagera), of Lake Albert Edward, and of
the Semliki) should come under the political control of Great Britain.
We have, therefore, cast our ægis over one of the most wonderful
regions, in some respects one of the most productive portions, of
Africa.
On the north there is the oldest country in the world, so far as
history goes,--Egypt, with its ten millions of Egyptians, Arabs,
Europeans, and Nubians; its cotton and wheat, maize, barley, beans,
sugar-cane, dates, rice, and clover; its petroleum, gold, and emeralds
in the eastern desert, and its alum and soda in the Libyan wastes;
Egypt, with its European or Mediterranean fauna and flora.
Then comes Nubia, producing little at present but fierce men of mixed
Hamitic, Semitic, and Negro blood; then the richer countries of Darfur,
Kordofan, Sennar, Bogos, Kasalá, and Galabat. Here there is no lack of
trade goods,--copper, camels, asses, and, above all, acacia gum. The
vegetation in these lands is no longer that of the Mediterranean. It
is African. On the hills above three thousand feet, appear dracænas
and euphorbias. In the lowlands there are baobabs, acacias, giant
fig-trees, wild-date palms, and the branching hyphæne. Here begins the
great fauna of Africa,--baboons, elephants, antelopes, lions, zebras,
cheetahs, leopards, spotted hyænas, wild asses, rhinoceroses, giraffes.
[Illustration: NUBIA: A “WASHOUT” ON THE SUDAN RAILWAY.]
Farther south comes the influence of the regular equatorial rains. The
steppe gives place to grasslands, and, above all, to marshes,--hopeless
marshes of papyrus, of Phragmites reeds, of the fleecy _Vossia_ grass,
of the floating _Pistia stratiotes_, the amaranth, the water-lily,
and the ambatch (a gouty bean with orange-coloured blossoms). In
these marshes swarm the hippopotamuses and crocodiles, long banished
from Egypt proper. Here strides and poses the extraordinary _Balæniceps
rex_ or Whale-headed stork. Sacred ibises, spoonbills, stilts, herons,
marabou storks, white storks, black storks, saddle-billed storks,
tantalus storks, Egyptian geese, spur-winged geese, knobnose geese,
ducks of many kinds frequent this dreary land, that, save to birds,
has no horizon; for everywhere the view is shut in with walls of reed
and rush and amphibious bush. Yet away beyond the marshes--marshes
which are really hidden lakes and mighty rivers with false banks of
floating vegetation--is a grassy country dotted with stony hillocks,
if one travels far enough from the river, and inhabited by naked Nile
Negroes. These are tall black men with long, thin shanks, and the gait
and attitudes of wading birds. They are cattle-keepers, above all, and
their vast unseen herds beyond the marsh lands breed and send forth
periodically for the devastation of Africa those cattle plagues which
recur at intervals of a few years.
[Illustration: TROPICAL FOREST AT ENTEBBE, ON THE NORTH-WEST SHORES OF
VICTORIA NYANZA,
(Now turned into Botanical Gardens.)]
To the southwest of Marshland begins an attractive, even beautiful,
park-like country of rolling, grassy downs, interspersed with fine
trees of ample foliage, with belts of forest along the rivers. Beyond
the parklands rises that tremendous tropical forest which passes thence
uninterruptedly over the water-parting into the basin of the Congo.
This tropical forest, only to be rivalled in luxuriance by that of
the Amazons in South America, stretches in a crescent curve along
the southwestern edge of the Nile basin to Ruwenzori, and, with a few
interruptions, into Unyoro, Uganda, and the northern shores of the
Victoria Nyanza. On the plateaux lying to the northeast of the Victoria
Nyanza are other areas of dense forest, but not always tropical in
character,--forests consisting of great conifers and tree-heaths, which
reappear on the high mountains of Abyssinia.
To the immediate south of the marshy country appears more parkland on
either side of the Mountain Nile, and in the countries of the Acholi,
the Lango, and the Lotuka. Beyond this parkland is the great area of
marshes between the Victoria Nile and Mount Elgon. North of Elgon
the parkland becomes more arid. East and west of the Victoria Nyanza
are beautiful and healthy plateaux ranging from six thousand to ten
thousand feet in altitude, and highly suggestive of Europe and the Cape
of Good Hope in their vegetation.
Between the watershed of Rudolf and that of the White Nile are many
mountains, but as one proceeds northward in the direction of the Sobat,
the country is increasingly parched and sandy where it is not stagnant
marsh.
Nileland contains within its limits the highest point of the African
continent,--the culminating peak (whichever it may be) of the Ruwenzori
range, a ridge which presents some thirty miles of snow and glaciers,
and perhaps attains twenty thousand feet in supreme altitude. South
of Ruwenzori, and still partly within the Nile watershed, is the
Mfumbiro group of volcanoes, two of which possibly exceed an altitude
of thirteen thousand feet. Away to the northeast of the Victoria
Nyanza is the great extinct volcano of Elgon, over fourteen thousand
feet in height, while the mountains of Abyssinia, where the Sobat, the
Blue Nile and its tributaries, and the Atbara take their rise, reach
in places to altitudes of sixteen thousand feet, and are capped with
patches of perpetual snow. Nileland, therefore, offers a wonderful
range of climate, temperature, and vegetation.
Its fauna comprises the most interesting, the biggest, and the
handsomest of African beasts. And its human races include nearly every
type of Negro and Negroid,--Congo Pygmies, Turkana giants, Masai
like Greek athletes and Balega[118] like apes, long-shanked Dinka
and Shiluk, short-limbed Lendu, burly Baganda, handsome Bahima, ugly
Berta and Shangala, bearded Nyam-nyam and womanish Madi; the clothed,
curly-haired Galas and the absolutely nude Nilotic Negroes. In Egypt
are pure Caucasians; in Nubia and Abyssinia, in the lands between the
Nyanzas, are people of this regal stock variously mixed with antecedent
Negro.
The Nile has been the main route by which in ancient times the
Caucasian invaded Negro Africa, the once exclusive path by which the
white man’s cultivated plants and domestic animals reached the torrid
lands and dense forests where the Negro, before the Caucasian touched
him, lived in the condition of the semi-beast. No Negro race cared
whence the Nile came or whither it flowed. Interest in geographical
problems, as it was remarked in the first chapter of this book, is
almost the exclusive heritage of the Caucasian. This is the human
race which for some three thousand years has felt first a flickering
curiosity, latterly an intense desire, to wrest the secret of the Nile
sources from the heart of Africa. Its aim is accomplished. The main
features of the Nile system are placed on the maps of civilised men,
are known to intelligent Egyptians, Arabs, Indians, and Abyssinians.
The Nile has been the Caucasian’s first and easiest way across the
desert to Real Africa before the ocean could be navigated. The Nile
basin, moreover, offered to the more sensitive white man elevated
areas, oases in a land of malarial fever, wherein he could make
some home or settlement, south of the Tropic of Capricorn, not too
dissimilar in climate and temperature to the lands of temperate
Europe and Asia. From the vantage-ground of Abyssinia, of the Nandi
and Ankole plateaux, of the Mediterranean Delta of the Nile, the
Caucasian may still direct the education of the Nile Negroes and
permeate increasingly these black and bronze-skinned, woolly-haired
backsliders from human progress with Caucasian blood, energy, and love
of knowledge, till the Nile Negro himself grows interested in the past
history of Nile discovery.