Cairo to Kisumu

by Frank G. Carpenter

Far up in the Sudan American engines are found pulling British trains, while the famous bridge at Atbara, which Kitchener said he must have in less time than the English could manufacture it, was made in the United States.

While the British have established first-class railroad service from Cairo and lower Egypt up into the Sudan, there also remain in this region some of the light military railways built during the wars with the Mahdi.

CHAPTER XX
KHARTUM

After the intensely hot and dust-filled six-hundred-mile journey across the desert from Wady Halfa it is good to be here amid the palm gardens and the lime trees of Khartum. I am in the flourishing capital of the Sudan, once, and not so long ago at that, the centre of an exceedingly prosperous slave trade and later the scene of the massacre of General Gordon and of Kitchener’s fierce fights with the Mohammedan fanatics.

Khartum lies at the junction of two of the chief rivers of North Africa, giving it navigable highways to Abyssinia and to the rich lands along the watershed of the Belgian Congo. It has railroads connecting it with the Mediterranean, and with the exception of one stretch of less than six hundred miles, where the cataracts are, it has the main stream of the Nile to give it cheap freight rates to Europe. It has opened a railroad to Suakim, on the Red Sea, and in time it will undoubtedly be one of the great stations on the principal route by steamer and rail from Cairo to the Cape.

I called upon the Governor of Khartum this afternoon and asked him to tell me the story of the city. Said he: “The buildings which you see here are all new, but the town is older than some of the mushroom cities of the United States. It was born before Chicago, being founded by Mehemet Ali a century ago. It grew remarkably fast, so that at ten years of age it was made the seat of the government of the Sudan and became an important commercial centre. It was here that Gordon made his effort to break up the slave trade and here that he was killed. He was butchered on the steps of a building on the site of the present Governor-General’s palace. Then the Mahdist leader declared that Khartum should be wiped out. He destroyed all the houses and made the inhabitants come to his new capital, Omdurman, which he had laid out on the other side of the White Nile about five miles to the south. When the people left they tore off the roofs and pulled out the doors of their houses and carried them along to use in their new houses at Omdurman.

“After that, for years, and until Kitchener came, Khartum was nothing but a brick pile and a dust heap. Omdurman had swallowed up not only its whole population, but that of a great part of the Sudan; for the Khalifa forced the tribes to come there to live, in order that he might have their men ready for his army in times of war. The result was that Omdurman had more than a half million inhabitants while Khartum had none.

“Then we had the war with the Khalifa, whom we finally conquered,” the Governor continued. “After we had reduced the greater part of Omdurman to ruins, we began planning the building of a great city. The idea at first was to force the people to move from Omdurman to Khartum, but it was finally decided that it would be far better to have a native city there, and to make this place the government and foreign centre, with a manufacturing and commercial town at Halfaya, or Khartum, North, on the northern bank of the Blue Nile.