Nor spiry grass is found; but sands instead
In sterile hills, and rough rocks rising grey.
A land of fears! where visionary forms,
Of grisly spectres from air, flood and fire
Swarm; and before them speechless Horror stalks.
Here, night by night, beneath the starless dusk,
The secret hag and sorcerer unblest
Their Sabbath hold, and potent spells compose,
Spoils of the violated graves——”
I once trekked down here in summer-time on the track of some gun-runners who were supposed to be making for Egypt from the west. It is a dreary region, horribly dead and monotonous, consisting of alternate stretches of hard ground covered with shining black pebbles, and white sand-dunes, stretching east and west, where the sand is so soft and powdery that camels and men sink deep into it, and the surface is so hot that one can hardly bear to feel it. There are no tracks or mashrabs, and we were the first party to set up cairns on the hills, wherever there were stones. If one travelled on and on for about a thousand miles one would arrive at Darfur, in the north-west corner of the Sudan. Until the war Darfur was an independent kingdom whose Sultan, Ali Dinar, reigned from his capital El Fasher in a similar manner to the Sultan of Wadai.