INTRODUCTORY 



odd years ago the first advice given me was, "If ever 

 you touch anything soft, clear" Next day my mentor, 

 suddenly springing- backwards, landed with iron heel 

 upon my instep. He had stepped on "something- 

 soft." It was a puff-adder! Passing over snakes and 

 scorpions, tsetse and seroots, with the whole tribe of 

 flying terrors, we have Baker's testimony that "every 

 bush and herb in Africa is armed with lances and 

 swords, daggers, bayonets, fish-hooks, hay-forks, and 

 harpoons." His banter is, in fact, almost too mild, 

 since many plants are 

 doubly and trebly 

 armed not only with 

 penetrative spears, 

 spores, and spicules, 

 but with subtle re- 

 curved thorns more 

 prehensile than barbed 

 wire ; while in some 

 species each series of 

 man-traps is cunningly 

 concealed beneath twin 

 pairs of leaves spring- 

 ing from the identical "THORNS." 

 point. The ubiquitous 



kitteir (Arabic, kittr] is a masterpiece of vicious malevo- 

 lence, and two thousand years ago during the Punic 

 Wars the allied caltrop-thorn suggested an instrument 

 modelled in its own similitude that brought charging 

 cavalry to a standstill. 



A certain monotony of landscape may be accounted 

 a disadvantage to Sudan. For 1500 miles or more the 

 waterways of Nile and White Nile traverse dead-level 

 plains with never a hill to vary the endless vistas of 

 sandy desert, of grass-prairie, or of grey-green forest : 

 and then the Sudd ! a hundred leagues of dismal papyrus. 

 Such transient beauty as a Sudan landscape may display 



