The Belgian Officials at Lado.
Gondokoro.
Henceforward our journey was comfortable, and regular. Yet though I had no official work to do and was merely coming home the shortest way, I could not traverse the Soudan without the keenest interest. When one has started from Cairo and padded up the Nile to Wady Halfa, crossed the desert railway to the Atbara, marched thence two hundred miles to the battle of Omdurman, one feels one has seen something of the Nile. Yet now we had followed it the other way from its source for nearly five hundred miles, and yet twelve hundred more intervened before even Omdurman was reached; and as the mighty and peerless river unrolled its length and immemorial history, the feelings of reverence, without which no traveller can drink its sweet waters, grew in intensity.
I yield to no one in recognition of the constructive and reconstructive work which Sir Reginald Wingate and his able officers have, with scanty means and in spite of grave military dangers, wrought in the Soudan. Yet it is not possible to descend the Nile continuously from its source at Ripon Falls without realizing that the best lies behind one. Uganda is the pearl. The Nile province and the Lado Enclave present splendid and alluring panoramas. Even the march from Nimule to Gondokoro is through a fertile and inspiring region. But thereafter the beauty dies out of the landscape and the richness from the land. We leave the regions of abundant rainfall, of Equatorial luxuriance, of docile peoples, of gorgeous birds and butterflies and flowers. We enter stern realms of sinister and forbidding aspect, where nature is cruel and sterile, where man is fanatical and often rifle-armed. Cultivation—nay, vegetation, is but a strip along the river bank: and even there thorn-bushes and prickly aloes are its chief constituents. We enter two successive deserts as contrasted in their character, as redoubtable in their inhospitality, as Dante's Circles of the Inferno: the Desert of Sudd and the Desert of Sand.
Review at Khartoum.