INTRODUCTION 3 



chances of successful sport. On the Sudanese side 

 this borderland is now not populated at all. Indeed, 

 from the time I left Kassala in November, 1910, 

 until I reached Singa on the Blue Nile in May, 1911, 

 I may say that I was travelling through the scene of 

 the greatest experiment in Home Rule that modern 

 times have furnished since the fall of the Zulu 

 dynasty of Chaka. In the period of thirteen years, 

 counting from the death of Gordon at Khartoum on 

 26th January, 1885, up to the battle of Omdurman 

 on 2nd September, 1898, it is believed that the 

 depredations of the Baggara and other tribes who 

 acknowledged the supremacy of the Mahdi, and his 

 successor the Khalifa, reduced the total population 

 of the Sudan from eight millions to two millions. 

 Since I have already heard these figures questioned 

 by persons who make it their business to prove that 

 no possible good can arise from the subordination of 

 coloured races by Europeans, I can bear my personal 

 testimony to the fact that whereas my French maps 

 of the Sudan, compiled during the period of Egyptian 

 occupation, prior to the Mahdi's rule, show no fewer 

 than twenty villages on the River Rahad above 

 Shammam, this tract of some fifty miles does not 

 now contain a single village, settled inhabitant, or 

 path other than a game track. Indeed, Sir Samuel 

 Baker, writing in the year 1861, somewhat plain- 

 tively notes the extreme monotony of the endless 



