Meanwhile the sun had gone down and it was starlight. Through the darkness could be heard the neighing of the horses and the panting of the heavily laden camels.
| [13] | About four dollars and seventy-five cents. |
| [14] | About two dollars. |
CHAPTER XVII
The old sheik, Hatim, faithfully kept the promise he had made to the Greek, and carefully protected the children. The road to the upper White Nile was a difficult one. They rode through Getena, El-Dueim, and Kawa; then they passed Abba, a wooded island in the Nile, on which, before the Mahdi’s war, a Dervish had lived in a hollow tree the life of a hermit. The caravan had to go around wide tracts of land covered with papyrus and swamps called “Suddis,” from which the wind blew a stench caused by rotted and decaying leaves that had accumulated around obstructions in the river. The English engineers had once removed these obstructions, and at one time steamers could go from Khartum to Fashoda, and even farther up.[[15]] But now the river was clogged up again, and as it could not flow freely, it overflowed both banks. The districts on the right and left banks were covered with a high jungle, from the midst of which heaps of ant-hills and isolated giant trees towered. In some places the woods extended to the stream. In dry places grew large groves of acacias.
During the first few weeks they still passed Arab settlements and small towns, consisting of houses with peculiar, ball-shaped roofs of straw, but on the other side of Abba, behind the settlement Gos-Abu-Guma, when they came to the land of the blacks, they found it quite deserted, for the Dervishes had carried off nearly all the natives and sold them in the slave-markets of Khartum, Omdurman, and other places. Those who escaped capture by hiding in the thickets and in the woods died of hunger and smallpox, which was unusually prevalent along the White and Blue Nile. The Dervishes themselves said that “entire nations” had died of it. Places that were formerly sorghum and banana plantations were now covered with jungle. Only wild animals multiplied, because there was no one to hunt them. Sometimes about sunset the children saw in the distance herds of elephants, that looked like moving rocks, slowly walking to their watering-place. As soon as Hatim, who was formerly an ivory-trader, caught sight of them he smacked his lips, sighed, and said confidentially to Stasch:
“Maschallah! How valuable they are! But they are not worth while hunting now, for the Mahdi has forbidden the Egyptian merchants to come to Khartum; so there is no one except the emirs to buy elephant tusks.”
Besides seeing elephants, they also came across giraffes, which ran off, treading heavily and swaying their long necks, as though they were lame. Behind Gos-Abu-Guma buffaloes and herds of antelope appeared more frequently. When the caravan was short of meat the men hunted them, but nearly always without success, for these animals are too watchful and fleet to be outwitted or cornered.
Usually the food was meted out somewhat sparingly, for in consequence of the land having been depopulated, one could not buy millet, bananas or fish, which the negroes of the Schilluk and the Dinka tribes used to sell to caravans in exchange for glass beads and copper wire.