Yet neither these inspiring facts—the more impressive by contrast with my memories of ten years before—nor the gracious hospitality of the Sirdar—more responsible than any other man for the whole of this tremendous task of reconstruction and revival—were to prevent me from taking away a sombre impression of Khartoum. As our steamer approached the landing-stage I learned that my English servant, George Scrivings, had been taken suddenly ill, and found him in a condition of prostration with a strange blue colour under his skin. Good doctors were summoned. The hospital of Khartoum, with all its resources, was at hand. There appeared no reason to apprehend a fatal termination. But he had been seized by a violent internal inflammation, the result of eating some poisonous thing which we apparently had escaped, and died early next morning after fifteen hours' illness, with almost every symptom of Asiatic cholera.
Too soon, indeed, had I ventured to rejoice. Africa always claims its forfeits; and so the four white men who had started together from Mombasa returned but three to Cairo. A military interment involves the union of the two most impressive rituals in the world. The day after the Battle of Omdurman it fell to my lot to bury those soldiers of the 21st Lancers, who had died of their wounds during the night. Now after nine years, in very different circumstances, from the other end of Africa, I had come back to this grim place where so much blood has been shed, and again I found myself standing at an open grave, while the yellow glare of the departed sun still lingered over the desert, and the sound of funeral volleys broke its silence.
The remainder of our journey lay in tourist lands, and the comfortable sleeping-cars of the Desert Railway, and the pleasant passenger steamers of the Wady Haifa and Assouan reach soon carried us prosperously and uneventfully to Upper Egypt; and so to Cairo, London, and the rest.
Philae.
CHAPTER XI
THE VICTORIA AND ALBERT RAILWAY
My journey is at an end, the tale is told, and the reader who has followed so faithfully and so far has a right to ask what message I bring back. It can be stated in three words. Concentrate upon Uganda!
Over the greater part of the north-east quarter of Africa, British influence or authority in one form or another is supreme. But when I turn my mind over all those vast expanses, excluding only Egypt, there is no region which offers prospects to compare in hopefulness with those of the Protectorate of Uganda. The Soudan is far greater in extent and importance, and Great Britain is at no charge in respect to it. But the Soudan is clearly inferior in fertility. The East African Protectorate possesses not only enormous coast-lands of great value, but noble plateaux where the air is as cool as an English spring. But we already spend on East Africa—and upon the needs of its expensive white settlers—more than the whole revenue of Uganda; and yet the promise is not so bright. Northern Somaliland is a desert of rocks and thorn bushes peopled by rifle-armed fanatics, on which we spend nearly half as much as the whole annual grant-in-aid of Uganda. And between Somaliland and Uganda there is this contrast presented in its crudest form—a barren land with dangerous inhabitants; and a fruitful land with a docile people. What is least worth having, is most difficult to hold: what is most worth having, is easiest.