Nowhere is the overpowering romance of the land brought more vividly before you than in the dining-cars or on the decks of the river steamers. The tall young Englishman in flannels who sits opposite you at table remarks casually that he is using a four months' leave of absence to go up Gondokoro-way after elephant, and a French marquis who is sitting near by, happening to overhear the conversation, leans across to inquire about the chances for sport on the Abyssinian frontier. “You can't go across there, you know,” interrupts a bimbashi, whose freckled Irish face looks strangely out of place beneath the tarboosh which denotes an officer in the Egyptian service. “The Hadendowas are on the rampage again and the Sirdar has issued orders that no one is to be permitted to cross into Menelik's territory until things have quieted down. There's no use your trying it, for the camel police are jolly well certain to turn you back.” The bearded man in the ill-fitting clothes, who would be taken almost anywhere for a commercial traveller, is, you are told, one of the most celebrated big-game shots in the world, and just now is on his way to the Lado Enclave in search of a certain rare species of antelope for the Berlin museum. The grizzled Egyptian officer sitting by himself—for the British no more mingle socially with the Egyptians than Americans do with negroes—once served under Gordon, as the bit of faded blue ribbon on the breast of his tunic denotes; the brown-faced Englishman in riding-clothes, with the wrinkles about his eyes which come from staring out across the sands under a tropic sun, is a pasha and the governor of a province as large as many a European kingdom, and farther up the line he will get off the train and disappear into the desert on one of his periodical tours of inspection, perhaps not seeing another white face for three months or more. It struck me that there was something particularly fine and manly and self-reliant about these young Englishmen who are acting as policemen and judges and administrators and agricultural experts rolled into one, out there at the Back of Beyond. “It's only the hard work that makes it bearable,” said one of them in answer to my question. “What with the heat and the flies and the never-ending vista of yellow sand and the lack of companionship, we should die from sheer loneliness if we didn't work from dawn until bedtime. Besides, every two years we get long enough leave to go home.” (And oh, the caress in that word home.) Then he asked me with pathetic eagerness about the latest song-hits at the London music-halls, and was this new Russian dancer at Covent Garden as wonderful as the illustrated weeklies made her out, and honestly, now, did I think the government was going to be such a bally ass as to give the Irish home rule? That young man—he was twenty-four on his last birthday, he told me—has charge of a province four times as large as New York State, and in it he wields a power which is a strange cross between the patriarchal and the despotic. With a score or so of camel police he maintains law and order among a population which, until very recent years, were as savage and intractable as the Sioux; he holds the high justice, the middle, and the low; and he is, incidentally, a practical authority on such varied subjects as wheat-growing, cotton-raising, camel-breeding, fertilising, and irrigation. Nor would I fail to call attention to the little-known but wonderful work of a handful of British officers, who, working continuously since 1898, in those fever-ridden swamps near Lake No, have finally succeeded in removing the last block of Sudd, [2] twenty-four miles long, thus making the Nile a free, navigable waterway from Khartoum to Rejaf, in Uganda, a distance of twelve hundred miles. And these young men, remember, are but isolated examples of the thousands, in Africa, in Asia, in America, and in Oceanica, who are binding together Britain's colonial empire.
[2] The name given to the dense masses of water plants which have long obstructed the upper reaches of the Nile.
Its discomforts notwithstanding, the railway journey from Wady Halfa to Khartoum is filled with interest, comparing not at all unfavourably with that other remarkable desert journey by the Trans-Caspian railway from Krasnovodsk to Samarkand. For two hundred miles or more after leaving Wady Halfa we see through the blue glass of the windows nothing but endless wastes of black rocks and orange sand. Then the desert gives place to undulating sand-hills, and these in turn to clusters of dom-palms, to fields of barley, to conical acacias, and finally a fringe of palms announces the proximity of the river. We pass in turn Gebel Barka, the sacred mountain of the ancient Egyptians, and, at its base, the ruins of Napata, once the capital of an Ethiopian kingdom. A few miles south of Atbara, which is the junction of the railway to Port Sudan, on the Red Sea, we pass the so-called Island of Meroe, with its score of pyramids, beside which the majestic monuments of Egypt are but the creations of yesterday, for this region, remember, was the cradle of the Egyptian arts and sciences. In the settlements along the banks we now begin to see the typical round straw huts of Central Africa, with their pointed roofs and airy recubas, or porches. The peoples change with the scenery, the slender, tarbooshed Nubian giving way to the fierce-faced, shock-headed Hadendowas, that savage fighting-clan who hold the country between the Nile and the Red Sea, and they, in turn, to the Kabbabish Bedouins, those freebooters of the desert, who, perched high on their lean white racing camels, were the terror of every caravan in the days before the British came. The cultivated patches become thicker, the signs of civilisation grow increasingly frequent, the train rumbles across a long iron bridge which spans the river, and slowing, comes to a halt before a long, low station building on which is the word “Khartoum.”
Like another Phœnix, Khartoum has risen from its ashes on the site of that city which formed the funeral pyre of the heroic Gordon. The name—“elephant's trunk”—refers to the shape of the long peninsula on which the city stands and which forms the point of separation of the Nile into its Blue and White branches. It is a brand-new city which the British engineers have constructed; a city with a ground plan as mathematically laid out and with streets as broad as Washington; a city with pavements and sidewalks and gutters and sewers and lighting facilities on the most modern lines. As all the buildings are of a dust-coloured brick, the business portion of the city has a certain air of substantial permanence, but so uncompromising is the architecture and so destitute of shade are the streets that it looks more like a Russian penal settlement than like an African capital. In the residential quarter, however, the picturesque has not been sacrificed to the utilitarian, for along the bank of the Blue Nile a splendid boulevard—a sort of African Riverside Drive—has been constructed, and here no business or commercial trespass will be permitted, for from the Grand Hotel to the Palace, a distance of a mile or more, it is lined with the residences of the British officials, low-roofed, broad-verandaed bungalows nestling in luxuriant gardens. The thing that impresses one most about Khartoum is the extraordinary width of its streets and diagonal avenues and the frequency of its open circles, but the British will tell you quite frankly that military considerations, rather than beauty, guided them in planning it and that a few field-guns, properly placed, can sweep the entire city. There are two buildings in Khartoum which seem to me to be more significant of the new era which has begun for the Sudan than all the other features of the city combined. One is the Gordon Memorial College, built with the object of training the sons of the Sudanese sheikhs and chieftains along those lines which are best calculated to make for the future peace, progress, and prosperity of the country. With his laurels as the victor of Omdurman still fresh upon him, Lord Kitchener appealed to his countrymen for one hundred thousand pounds for the establishment of this institution, which he felt that England owed to the memory of Gordon, and, so prompt and general was the response, the entire sum was subscribed within a few days. The other building to which I referred is the recently completed Anglican Cathedral, which stands as a recognition of Gordon's great work as a missionary and as an impressive exhibition of the advance of the Christian faith. Could Gordon have returned to life on the occasion of the consecration of this cathedral, and have seen harmoniously gathered beneath its lofty roof religious dignitaries of such different minds and faiths as the Bishop of London, the Coptic Archbishop of Alexandria, the Greek Patriarch of Abyssinia, and the Grand Cadi and the Grand Mufti, the heads of the Mohammedan community in the Sudan, he might well have exclaimed, “I did not die in vain.”
I have now sketched for you the conditions which prevailed in the Valley of the Nile before the English came and those which obtain there to-day. What its future is to be depends wholly upon the action of England. Were she to leave the country now, or within the near future, she would leave it under conditions which would soon result in chaos, and the good that she has done would be largely lost. The extensive schemes of irrigation upon which she has entered, and upon which the prosperity of this whole region so largely depends, could never be financed by an independent Egypt, and the same is true of the question of transportation, which is at the bottom of all the problems of economic development in the Sudan.
That England's position in the Nile country is illegal and illogical her stanchest supporters do not attempt to deny, but those who are really familiar with Egyptian conditions and character will agree with me, I think, that Egypt could suffer no greater calamity than to have the English go. Not that I think that there is the slightest probability of their doing so, for Italy's aggression in Tripolitania, combined with the attitude of the other members of the Triple Alliance, has resulted in Britain strengthening, rather than relaxing, her grip on Egypt and the Suez Canal. The canal provides, indeed, the key to the entire Egyptian situation, for upon her control of it depends England's entire scheme of administration in India and the Farther East. To withdraw her forces from Egypt would be tantamount to leaving the gateway to her Eastern possessions unguarded, and that, I am convinced, she will never do. Two lesser, though in themselves important, reasons militate against her surrendering the control of the Valley of the Nile. One is her hope of eventually realising, in spite of German opposition, Cecil Rhodes's dream of an “All Red” route from the Cape to Cairo, of which Egypt and the Sudan would be the northern links. The other is the belief that in the scientific irrigation and cultivation of the fertile Nile lands lie the means of freeing British manufacturers from their dependence on American cotton. I am inclined to believe, therefore, that in the not far-distant future England will become convinced that candour is a better policy than hypocrisy, and will frankly add to her globe-girdling chain of colonial possessions the whole of that vast region lying between the mouths of the Nile and the swamps of the Sudd.