Fording the Asua.
This was accomplished uneventfully in six stages, three of which were double marches. The country was pleasant and healthy, the scenery imposing, and, under a fierce sun, the air was cool. Each morning we started before dawn, and by noon had camped by the side of one of the tributary rivers or streams which flow into the Nile. Of these the Asua was the most important, and the picture of the long safari fording it and coming into camp among the palm-trees of the southern bank is one which lingers pleasantly in my memory. But this I must say—somehow after Nimule the charm was broken, and none of the regions through which the traveller passes in the long-drawn descent of the Nile revive in any degree those delicious sensations of wonder and novelty which are associated with the great lakes and the kingdoms of Uganda, Usoga, and Unyoro, to say nothing of what I have not been fortunate enough to see—Toro, Ankole, the Semliki, and the Mountains of the Moon.
At the end of the sixth day we arrived at Gondokoro. The last march had been long and scorching. The moisture seemed to have gone from the air, and the vegetation, abundant though it was, seemed parched and stunted. The approaches to Gondokoro are beset by a herd of three hundred elephants of peculiar ill-fame. Nearly all the eligible tuskers have been killed. The females and young bulls are fierce and wary, and, taught by frequent contact with the white man, and protected by the sacred game laws, exercise a lawless and tyrannical power over the whole region. On every side their depredations are to be seen. Great trees pushed over in careless sport, native plantations trampled into ruin, the roads rendered precarious for the traveller, the mails often interrupted for days at a time, and occasional loss of life, are the features of this domination. And it seems likely to last a long time, for I was informed that the young bulls would not be sufficiently grown for about forty years, and even then, as the two white officers in the station are not allowed to shoot more than one elephant apiece each year, the nuisance will only gradually be abated.
Rogue elephants are of course fair game at any time, and the day before we arrived at Gondokoro, the young civil officer of the station had encountered one in a manner which he was scarcely likely to forget. For, having pursued this evil-doer for some time, he at last got into an excellent position, and was about to fire at a distance of thirty yards when suddenly the elephant, without even trumpeting rushed furiously upon him, and, paying no attention to the two heavy bullets which struck him in the head, chased the officer twice round an uncommonly small bush; and then, distracted by the spectacle of the native gun-bearer in flight, turned off after this new prey, and, overtaking the poor wretch, smashed him to pieces with one blow of his terrible trunk. "Cet animal est très méchant; quand on l'attaque, il se défend." We reached the bungalow, which serves as the seat of government, in time to see the tusks of this man-slayer, who had died of his wounds, brought in by the tribe whose plantations he had so often ravaged.
Gondokoro, like most of the names which figure so imposingly upon the African map, is not a numerously populated town. There are about six houses and a number of native huts. There is, however, a telegraph station, a prison, a court-house, and the lines of a company of native police and King's African Rifles. Here the Nile again becomes navigable, and offers an unbroken waterway open to large vessels until the Shabluka cataract is reached, a hundred miles below Khartoum and fifteen hundred miles from Gondokoro. And here at the river's bank, seen through a tracery of palms, were the white funnel and superstructure of the Sirdar's steamer with all the letters and newspapers; and which, instead of pursuing us across Uganda, had "come through the other way."
"Had come through the other way"—it is an easy phrase to write: but how much it signifies in the modern history of Africa! Ten or eleven years ago this journey which I was now able to make so easily, so prosperously, so comfortably, would have been utterly impossible. The Dervish empire, stretching from Wady Halfa or Abu Hamed to Wadelai, interposed a harsh barrier which nothing but a stricken field could sweep away; and these long reaches of the Nile which now bore a fleet of fifty steamers were silent in the embrace of a devastating barbarism. A grim slaughter which had strewn the sands of Kerreri, twelve hundred miles to the North, with jibba-clad corpses "like snow-drifts" had blasted a passage, and the Nile was free.
Embarked at Gondokoro we passed out of the sphere of the Colonial Office into the domain of that undefined joint authority which regulates the Soudan, which flies two flags side by side on every public building, and which you can only correspond with through the British Foreign Office.
