It is a strange contrast to go a little further on through the western outskirts of the town, and to find a game of polo proceeding on the hard desert sand. And beyond, again, in the middle of these great spaces, far from the rush and turmoil of the town, are the quiet graves of two or three of those who have laid down their lives in this far country, and shall see their homes no more.
It would take a long time to get tired of merely riding about in Omdurman and watching the thousand and one sights of such a place, and reflecting on the stranger scenes that must so frequently have been enacted there less than five short years ago. But if you want a gallop in the desert, nothing is more delightful than to pass along the broad street leading northwards through the deserted quarters of the once huge city, and to ride, with the keen wind blowing freshly in your face, to Gebel Surgham, the hill which overlooks the field of Kerreri, that historic field of bloodshed. The merest novice can easily follow every phase of the battle, and see where wave after wave of the dervish hosts rushed madly but heroically to their doom. Some of their skulls still lie bleaching in the sun. There, too, is the khor where the Lancers made their famous charge. Or you may take boat, and sail past the mud forts that saluted the steamers which came just too late for the watcher anxiously straining his eyes to see them from the palace in Khartoum. Almost every spot has its own historic interest. Perhaps as you skim along before the wind a battered old paddle-steamer labours creaking past, towing a string of barges. It is one of Gordon’s gunboats, once more patched up and restored to duty.
But of all the sights and interests of this fascinating place, by far the most impressive, as in Cairo itself, is the ancient and mighty river. Khartoum and Omdurman are what they are because here the two great tributaries join their forces and set out across the waterless desert on their great mission to Egypt. The spot where the Blue and White rivers meet, and for some distance flow side by side unmingled, would be still in many ways the most notable in all Northern Africa, even if Khartoum and all its eventful history were blotted out.
CHAPTER XVII
THE NEW SOUDAN
Khartoum would be a sad place to visit if it were nothing more than a city of memories. Happily, it is no longer so. It has indeed a history behind it, full of lessons and warnings which cannot be ignored. But the Khartoum of to-day is looking forwards, and not backwards; it is the young capital of a young country. It is barely four years since the final defeat and death of the Khalifa, and it is only from that date that the establishment of settled government can be reckoned.
The Sirdar, Sir Reginald Wingate (the post of Governor-General of the Soudan is still combined with the command of the Egyptian Army) might well have despaired of the task which confronted him of administering those vast regions, 1,000,000 square miles in extent, when he succeeded to his post. The difficulties to be faced were enormous. It seemed as if every germ of civilization had been extinguished by the dervish rule. Everywhere villages were deserted; lands, once fertile, had gone out of cultivation; actual famine was seriously threatened. The decrease of population was extraordinary. Whole tribes enumerated in Colonel Stewart’s list had totally disappeared. When the British troops reached Metemmeh in the final march to Khartoum, they found the place a shambles. The once powerful tribe of the Jaalin had been massacred almost to a man by the Baggara dervishes. That was but one instance out of many of the Khalifa’s methods of government.
From a country so wasted and desolate it seemed hopeless to expect a revenue for many years. The fabric of administration had to be built up again from the very bottom, and there was no money to do it with, far less to provide for that capital expenditure always necessary in a new country. Only Suakin, Halfa, and Dongola, from their longer military occupation, possessed even the rudiments of the machinery of government. No money was to be expected from England. More than that, every British officer in the Soudan was turning longing eyes to the war in South Africa. It was difficult to get new men with such an attraction elsewhere. Yet in spite of this it may be fairly said that the Soudan government has come safely through the troublous period of infancy. Sheer hard work on wise and statesman-like lines has had its due effect, and the British officials, most of them soldiers whose abilities would have brought them to distinction elsewhere could they have been spared, can so far congratulate themselves on the result of their patient labours.
Though greatly shrunk within its former limits, the Anglo-Egyptian Soudan is still of very great extent. On the north the boundary with Egypt is now the twenty-second parallel, following this line, which passes just north of Wadi Halfa, right across the desert to the Tripoli border on the west, and to the Red Sea on the east. It then follows the coast past Suakin as far as a point about seventy miles south of Tokar, where it meets the Italian colony of Eritrea. Here, turning inland, it runs south-west, crossing the river Gash just above Kassala, down to a point on the Setit River, another tributary of the Atbara. Here Abyssinian territory begins, and the boundary trends more to the south than before, going by Gallabat and crossing the upper waters of the Rahad and the Dinder, tributaries of the Blue Nile, till it reaches the Blue Nile itself just above Famaka and Fazokhl. Hence it runs right south to the west of the Beni Shangul hills, across the Baro, Pibor, and Akobo rivers, all in the Upper Sobat district, till it reaches a point where the sixth degree of north latitude cuts the thirty-fifth degree of longitude east of Greenwich. The sixth parallel is roughly the line of division between the Soudan and the Uganda Protectorate as far as the Nile, the southernmost Soudanese post on the Nile being at Mongalla, and the northernmost British at Gondokoro. On the other side of the Nile the boundary, starting from Lake Albert, runs north-west for a very long distance along the Nile-Congo watershed, first along the Congo Free State, then along French Congoland, till it reaches the borders of Darfur. The corner, however, between the Nile and this line, as far west as the thirtieth degree of longitude east, and as far north as a point nearly opposite Mongalla, is known as the Lado Enclave, and is still held by the Belgians, being leased by them during the life of King Leopold. On reaching Darfur the boundary runs northwards along the western edge of that country to about the thirteenth parallel, and thence north-west across the desert to the borders of Tripoli.
In this vast area, some 1,200 miles in length and 1,000 in breadth at the broadest part, there is naturally an immense variety of country. The Northern Soudan is, with the exception of a strip of land along the Nile, almost a desert; it is, in fact, a lesser Egypt. Up to Shendi it is a rainless country. From Shendi to Khartoum, and some way south, there is a regular but not extraordinary rainfall during the months of July, August, and September. Further south, about parallel 13°, tropical rains begin, becoming heavier and longer towards the Abyssinian hills on the one side and the Upper White Nile and the Bahr el Ghazal on the other. With the rainfall the character of the country changes. To the west of the White Nile, between parallels 15° and 11°—that is, nearly as far south as Fashoda—the country of Kordofan and Darfur stretches in vast plains or steppes, covered with low thorny trees, mimosa and gum trees, and prickly-grass. Water is scarce, and stored in wells and the trunks of baobab-trees. There are occasional hills, which become greater and more numerous towards the west and the south. In Southern Kordofan the plains and valleys between the hills are rich in vegetation and huge trees. They are impassable during the rains, and also after them, until the long grass has been cleared by burning.