DOWN THE WHITE NILE
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 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 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 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 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.
[Illustration: 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. 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 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 him to pieces with one blow of
his terrible trunk. "Cet animal est trËs mÈchant; quand on l'attaque,
il se dÈfend." 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 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.
[Illustration: THE BELGIAN OFFICIALS AT LADO.]
[Illustration: 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 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 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.
[Illustration: REVIEW AT KHARTOUM.]
[Illustration: 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 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 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_ 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.
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!
[Illustration: 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. 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 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 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.
[Illustration: 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 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 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.
[Illustration: 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.
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.
[Illustration: PHILAE.]