Soudan Government Steamer "Dal."
About a hundred miles from Gondokoro the White Nile enters and spills itself in a vast and appalling swamp. Of the action of this tremendous sponge, whether beneficial in regulating the flow, or harmful in wasting the water through evaporation, nothing need here be said. But its aspect is at once so dismal and so terrifying that to travel through it is a weird experience. Our steamer, with the favouring current, made at least seven miles an hour, and, as the moon was full, we travelled night and day. For three days and three nights we were continuously in this horrible swamp into which the whole of the United Kingdom could be easily packed. By day from the roof of the high pilot-house a commanding view revealed hour after hour, in every direction, one uninterrupted ocean of floating vegetation spreading to far horizons. The papyrus-plant is in itself a beautiful, graceful, and venerable thing. To travel through the sudd, is to hate it for evermore. Rising fifteen feet above the level of the water, stretching its roots twenty or even thirty feet below, and so matted and tangled together that elephants can walk safely upon its springy surface, papyrus is the beginning and end of this melancholy world. For hundreds of miles nothing else is to be perceived—not a mountain-ridge blue on the horizon, scarcely a tree, no habitation of man, no sign of beast. The silence is broken only by the croaking of innumerable frog armies, and the cry of dreary birds.
The vigorous operations of the sudd-cutters have opened, and the constant traffic of steamers has preserved and improved, a channel about a hundred yards wide, winding by loops and corkscrews through the swamp. The river presents a depth of thirty feet along this course, and greater vessels could thread its length for nearly a thousand miles. The navigation is intricate and peculiar. Indeed, it would seem to be an art by itself. No effort is made by the Arab pilots, who alone are employed, to avoid collisions with the banks. On the contrary, they rely upon them as an essential feature of their management of the steamer. The vessel bumps regularly at almost every corner from one cushion of sudd to the other, or plunges its nose into the reeds and waits for the currents to carry its stern round, bumps again and recovers its direction. Sometimes where the twists were very sharp we would turn completely round, not once but two or three times, and our movements round an S-curve were even more complicated. The bumps occasionally swept us out of our chairs and sent us sprawling on the deck. In this strange fashion we waltzed along at full speed for about seventy or eighty hours.
Meanwhile the Nile was accomplishing its destiny. Its vast tributary rivers, the Sobat and the Bahr-el-Ghazal, came to reinforce its flow. The miles spread out behind us in a long succession of hundreds. At length the sudd expanses begin to contract. Distant mountains rise against the steel-blue sky in serrated silhouette, and gradually draw in upon the river. Islands of earth and trees, peaks of sharp rock break here and there the awful monotony of waving reeds. At last the banks become firm and clear-cut walls of yellow sand, fringed in places with palms and shady trees, and everywhere bristling with undergrowth of thorns. We leave the wilderness of moisture, we approach the wilderness of drought. But first, in a middle region, vast areas of dusty scrub-covered plains, not wholly incapable of cultivation in the rainy season, supporting always flocks and herds, now flank both sides of the river. The camel caravans pad slowly across them under the blaze and glitter of the heat. The mirage begins to twist and blur the landscape with deceptive waters. At intervals of forty or fifty miles are the stations of the Soudan Government, each trim and regular with its public buildings, its storehouses, the lines of beehive huts of its garrison, a tangle of native sailing-craft, and always, or nearly always, one or two white gunboats of war-time days now turned policemen of the river.
Thus we reach in time Fashoda—now called Kodok for old sake's sake; and here are clusters of Shillooks who (by request) stand pensively on one leg in their natural attitude, and smart companies of Soudanese troops and British officers, civil and military—the whole clear-cut under sun-blaze dry light, veiled only in dancing dust-devils piteously whipped by strong hot winds. All this was like a piece of the Omdurman campaign to me—the old familiar Soudan, so often made known to British minds by pen, pencil, and photograph during nearly twenty years of war, unfolded itself feature by feature. Yet we were still five hundred miles south of Khartoum!
A SHELUK AT KODOK (FASHODA).
At Meshra-er-Zeraf we stopped for two days to shoot, by the Sirdar's invitation, in the extensive game reserve, and were fortunate in securing a buffalo and various antelope. We wandered through a harsh country, of white sand and tussocks of coarse grass, more grey than green, with leafless black thorn-trees densely tangled; yet it seemed full of game. In three hours' walk on the second morning I shot a fine waterbuck, two reed-bucks, and two of a beautiful herd of roan antelope, who walked slowly down to water past our ambuscade. And, be it remembered, that the pleasure and excitement of such sport are in these lands always heightened by the possibility that at any moment the hunters may come upon game of much more serious quality—lion or buffalo; so that no one cares to be more than a few yards from his heavy rifle or give his mind wholly to the buck he stalks. Surely they are perverse, unenterprising folk who spend fortunes each year in preserving with so much artificial care, and to the inconvenience of other dwellers in a small island, well-counted herds of more or less tame deer, when in a month, and for less expense than the year's rent of their forests, they could pursue wild animals of every kind in their natural haunts and gain experiences that would last them all their lives.