A gift from Ali Dinar, Sultan of Darfur, to the Sirdar of the Sudan. (The Sultan of Darfur is a semi-independent and powerful native ruler of the Southwestern Sudan.)
STRANGE PEOPLE FROM INNERMOST AFRICA.
I was told so repeatedly by people in other and more favoured parts of Africa that the Sudan was nothing but a waste of sun-scorched sand, that I went there as much to see if the description were a true one as for any other reason. You don't have to search for romance in the Sudan; it's there waiting for you when you arrive. It met me on the station platform at Wady Halfa, which is the first town across the Sudanese frontier, in the form of a fair-haired, moon-faced, khaki-clad guard on the Khartoum express, who spurned the tip I proffered him to secure a compartment to myself as insolently as the poor but virtuous heroine of the melodrama spurns the villain's gold. He drew back as though the silver I offered him were a rattlesnake in working order and his face flushed a dull brick-red; then, bowing stiffly from the waist, as a Prussian officer does when he is introduced, he turned on his heel and strode away. “I say, you got the wrong one that time, old chap,” remarked an Englishman who had witnessed the little incident and who, judging from his pith helmet and riding-breeches, was of the country. “You probably didn't know that you were offering a tip to a former captain in his German Majesty's garde du corps?” I remarked that a month before a former general of division of the Bey of Tunis had accepted with marked gratitude a tip not half so large for showing me through the Palace of the Bardo.
“Well, this Johnnie won't,” was the reply. “He may not have much money, but he's loaded to the gunwales with pride. The story of his career sounds as if it had served as a model for one of Ouida's novels. Refused to marry the girl his parents had picked out for him, so his father cut off his allowance and left him to shift for himself. He sent in his papers, went to Algeria, and enlisted—of all fool things!—in that regiment of earth's hard cases called the Foreign Legion. It didn't take him long to get all he wanted of that kind of soldiering, so one day, when he was sent down to Oran in charge of a prisoner, he swam out to a British steamer lying in the harbour, worked his passage to Alexandria, enlisted in a British cavalry regiment, took part in Kitchener's campaign against the Khalifa, was wounded in the shindy at Omdurman, and retired on a pension. Now he wears a guard's uniform and carries a green flag and walks up and down the platform shouting 'All aboard for Khartoum!' And at home he would have a coronet on his visiting-cards and spend his afternoons swaggering along Unter den Linden. Extraordinary what a man will do if he has to, isn't it? But you'll find lots more of the same kind in the Sudan. It's no place for idlers down here; every one works or gets out.”
That struck me as a pretty promising introduction to a country which, so I had been assured elsewhere, had nothing more interesting to recommend it than sun and sand, and it was with a marked rise in my anticipations that I saw my luggage stowed away in a compartment of one of the long railway carriages, which are painted white for the same reason that a man wears a white suit in the tropics, which have windows of blue glass to prevent the sun-glare from injuring the passengers' eyes, and which are provided with both outside and inside blinds in an attempt to keep out a little of the heat. Looked at from any stand-point that you please, the thirty hours' railway journey from Wady Halfa to Khartoum is far from being an enjoyable experience, for a light in your compartment means a plague of flies, while any attempt to get air, other than that kicked up by the electric fan, means suffocating dust. It being too dark to read and too hot to sleep, the only alternative is to sit in your pajamas, swelter, and smoke.
Considering the obstacles it has had to overcome, the Sudan government deserves great credit for the railways it has built and the trains it operates. The construction of the railway to Khartoum was undertaken by General Kitchener in 1896, in order to support the advance of his army, and, in spite of the difficulty of laying a railway line across the sandy and stony surface of the desert, the work was so energetically carried on that the line advanced at the rate of a mile a day. The most serious obstacle was, of course, the provision of an adequate supply of water for the engines and workmen, so a series of watering-stations was established, at which wells, sunk to a depth of eighty feet or more, tap the subterranean water. These stations are so far apart, however, that to supply the engines it is necessary to attach two or more tank-cars to each train. Still another difficulty is the shifting sand, which, during the period of the khamsin, or desert wind, proves as disastrous to railroading in the Sudan as snow does to the railroads of our own Northwest, an inch of sand throwing an engine from the rails far more effectually than a yard of snow.
It was my fortune, by the way, to encounter one of the huboubs, or sand-storms, for which the Sudan is famous. To give an adequate idea of it, however, is as impossible as it is to describe any other overwhelming phenomenon of nature. Far off across the desert we saw it approaching at the speed of a galloping horse—a great fleecy, yellowish-brown cloud which looked for all the world like the smoke of some gigantic conflagration. A distant humming, which sounded at first like the drone of a million sewing-machines, gradually rose into such a roar as might be made by a million motor-cars, and then the storm was upon us. The sand poured down as though shaken through a sieve; the landscape was blotted out; the sun was obscured and there came a yellow darkness, like that of a London fog; men and animals threw themselves, or were hurled, to the ground before the fury of the wind, while a mantle of sand, inches thick, settled upon every animate and inanimate thing. Then it was gone, as suddenly as it had come, and we were left dizzy, bewildered, blinded, half-strangled, and gasping for breath, amid a landscape which was as completely shrouded in yellow sand as an American countryside in winter is covered with snow. Under any circumstances a sand-storm is a disagreeable experience, but out on the desert, where the traveller's life frequently depends upon the plainness of the caravan trails, it ofttimes brings death in its train.
It is a gratifying compliment to American mechanical skill that the running-time between Wady Halfa and Khartoum has been shortened four hours by the recent adoption of American locomotives, which run, fittingly enough, over American-made rails. In the construction of its trains the Sudan government has avoided the irksome privacy of the European compartment car and the unremitting publicity of the American Pullman by designing a car which combines the best features of both. The first-class cars on the Sudanese express trains contain a series of coupés, each somewhat roomier than the drawing-room in a Pullman sleeper and each opening into a spacious corridor which runs the length of the car. For day use there is one long cushioned seat running crosswise of each compartment, which at night forms the lower berth, the back of the seat swinging up on hinges to form the upper. Each coupé is provided with running water, a folding table, two arm-chairs of wicker, and an electric fan, without which last, owing to the almost incredible dust which a train sets in motion, one would all but suffocate. At several stations along the line are well-equipped baths, at which the trains stop long enough for the passengers hurriedly to refresh themselves.
The mention of these railway baths recalls an incident which seems amusing enough to relate. I once had as a fellow-passenger on the journey from Khartoum northward a red-faced, white-moustached, choleric-tempered English globe-trotter, who was constitutionally opposed to the practice of tipping, which he took occasion to characterise on every possible occasion as “An outrage—a damnable outrage, sir!” Now, at these wayside bath stations it has long been the accepted custom to give the equivalent of five cents to the silent-footed native who fills the tub, brings you your soap and towels, and brushes your garments. But this the irascible Englishman, true to his principles, refused to do, still further unpopularising himself by loudly cursing the cleanliness of the tub, the warmth of the water, the size of the towels, and the slowness of the Sudanese attendant. Five minutes before the time for the train to leave the whistle gave due warning and the passengers scrambled from the bath into their clothes, which the native attendants were accustomed to brush and leave outside the bath-room doors. Every one hurried into his clothes, as I have remarked, except the anti-tipping Englishman, who almost choked with blasphemy when he found that his garments had mysteriously disappeared. Though a hasty search was instituted, not a trace of them could be found, the impassive Sudanese stolidly declaring that they had seen nothing of the effendi's missing apparel. The engine shrieked its final warning and the laughing travellers piled aboard—all, that is, but the Englishman, who rushed onto the platform clad in a bath towel, only to retreat before the shocked glances of the women passengers. My last impression of that God-forsaken, sun-blistered bath station in the desert was the rapidly diminishing sound of his imprecations as he continued his fruitless search for his garments. There was no other train, I should add, for three days. Weeks later I heard that his clothes were eventually returned to him by a native, who said that he had found them, neatly folded, underneath a near-by culvert.