From Pole to Pole: A Book for Young People

by Sven Anders Hedin

Twelve hundred miles south of the capital of modern Egypt the desert comes to an end, and the surface is covered by vast marshes and beds of waving reeds. This is the Sudan, "the Land of the Blacks." At the point where the White and Blue Niles mingle their waters lay the only town in the Sudan, Khartum, whither trade-routes converged from all directions, and where goods changed hands. Here were brought wares which never failed to find purchasers. The valuable feathers plucked from the swift-footed ostrich were needed to decorate the hats of European ladies; the wild elephants, larger and more powerful than their Indian congeners, were shot or caught in pitfalls in the woods for the sake of their precious ivory. But the most esteemed of all the wares that passed through Khartum were slaves—"black ivory," as they were called by their heartless Arab torturers. Elephants' tusks are heavy, and cannot be transported on horses or oxen from the depths of the forest, for draught animals are killed by the sting of the poisonous tsetse fly. Therefore the tusks had to be carried by men, and when these had finished their task they were themselves sold into Egypt, Syria, and Turkey. The forests and deserts were not inexhaustible; ivory and ostrich feathers might be worked out, but there would always be negroes.

When the Khedive Ismail invited Gordon to enter his service as governor of the new province not far from the sources of the Nile, Gordon accepted the post in the hope that he would be able to suppress slave-trading, or at least to check the hunting of black men and women. He left Cairo and travelled by the Red Sea to Suakin, rode to Berber on the Nile, and was received with much pomp and ceremony by the Governor-General at Khartum. Here he heard that the Nile was navigable for 900 miles southwards, and therefore he could continue his journey without delay.

The Nile afforded an excellent passage for Gordon's small steamboat. But the Nile can also place an insurmountable obstacle in the traveller's way. After the rainy season the White Nile overflows its banks, forming an inextricable labyrinth of side branches, lakes, and marshes. The country lies under water for miles around. The waterway between impenetrable beds of reeds and papyrus is often as narrow as a lane. The roots of large plants are loosened from the mud at the bottom, and are compacted with stems and mud into large sheets which are driven northwards by the rushing water. They are caught fast in small openings and sudden bends, and other islets of vegetation are piled up against them. Thus the river course is blocked, and above these natural dams the water forms lakes. Such banks of drifting or arrested and decaying vegetation are called sudd, and the more it rains the greater are the quantities that come down. At length the sudd becomes soft and yields to the pressure of the water, and then the Nile is navigable again.

Gordon's small steamer glides gently up the river. He advances deeper and deeper into a world unknown to him, and around him seethes tropical Africa. On the banks papyrus stems wave their plumes above the reeds. It was from the pith of papyrus stems that the old Egyptians made a kind of paper on which they wrote their chronicles. Here and there swarthy natives are seen between the reed beds, and sometimes noisy troops of wandering monkeys gaze at the boat. The hippopotami look like floating islands, but show themselves only at night, wallowing in the shallow water. A little beyond the luxuriant vegetation of the banks extends the boundless grassland with its abundant animal life and thin scattered clumps of trees.

After a journey of four days the steamer glided past an island. There dwelt in a grotto a dervish or mendicant monk named Mohamed Ahmed, who ten years later was to be Gordon's murderer.

In the middle of April Gordon and his companions were in Gondokoro, a small place which now stands on the boundary between the Sudan and British East Africa, and here he took charge of his Equatorial Province. He forced the Egyptian soldiers, who garrisoned this and one or two other posts on the Nile and robbed on their own account, to plough and plant; he arrested all slave-hunters within reach and freed the slaves; he succoured the poor, protected the helpless, and sent durra to the hungry.

The heat was excessive, and Gordon and his staff were pestered by crowds of gnats. It was still worse in September when the rain poured down and large tracts were converted into swamp, from which dangerous miasma was exhaled. In a month seven of Gordon's eight officers had died of fever, but he himself continued his work undismayed, and wrote in his diary: "God willing, I shall do much in this country."

He soon perceived that the best districts of his province lay around the large lakes in the south. But the Equatorial Province was too far away from Egypt. It hung as it were on a long string, the Nile, and from the largest lake, the Victoria Nyanza, the distance to Cairo in a straight line was nearly 2200 miles. Much shorter was the route to Mombasa on the east coast, so Gordon advised the Khedive to occupy Mombasa and open a road to the Victoria Nyanza. Then it would be easier to contend against the slave-trade. He described the condition of the Sudan in forcible letters, and into the Khedive's ears were dinned truths such as he never heard from his servile pashas. He would first establish steam communication with the lakes, and a number of boats which could be taken to pieces were on the way to his province.

The boats came up at the time when the Nile began to rise after rain, and then his plan was to advance farther southwards. The natives were opposed to this progress and feared the supremacy of Egypt, and therefore they tried to prevent the advance of the "White Pasha," who was loath to employ arms against them. All they wanted was to be left in peace in their grasslands and forests; and when now an intruder, whose aims they did not understand, penetrated into their country, they endeavoured whenever they could to bar his way, so that he was obliged, much against his will, to resort to force.

After all kinds of troubles and difficulties he reached at last the northernmost of the Nile lakes, the Albert Nyanza, and it was a great feat to have brought a steamer even thus far. He did not succeed in reaching the Victoria Nyanza, for the ruler of the country between the lakes had resolved to oppose with all his power any intruder, were he white man or Arab.