4 SAVAGE SUDAN 



is oft illusory ; those soft attractive hues are but the 

 deception of tropical sunlight akin to the mirage of the 

 desert. Scenes which more powerfully impress though 

 not by their. beauty, unless there be a beauty in appalling 

 desolation are the Northern Deserts, the Deserts of 

 Nubia, stretching for 500 miles to the northward from 

 Khartoum. It was across these that in 1897 Lord 

 Kitchener drove his strategic railway. Nowadays one 

 surveys the whole (and better realises his difficulties) 

 from the comfort of a ''tropical train" running thrice 

 a week! 



But though, on the Nile, contours may weary, yet 

 colours oft offer compensation. So intense in these vast 

 spaces is the element of light, with contrasted shade in 

 equal ratio, that the brilliance of colour-effects at dawn 

 and dusk transcends anything I have seen elsewhere, and 

 tenfold more the power of words to portray. Such things 

 no wise man will attempt possibly even this bald 

 inference exceeds the limit : 



"What skilful limner e'er would choose 

 To paint the rainbow's varying hues, 

 Unless to mortal it were given 

 To dip his brush in dyes of heaven ?" 



Marmion. 



It has, however, been charged against writers on Africa's 

 wilder aspects that they have no eye for Nature's beauties 

 beyond the big-game. The reproach may be deserved ; 

 but it is fair to reply that, by the nature of their avoca- 

 tion, both big-game hunter and wildfowler witness that 

 spectacle of the sun "rising over the rim" (as the poetic 

 define the phenomenon) some six times a week, and so 

 frequent a repetition of sonorous epithets would surely 

 pall. A shy suspicion even suggests itself that some 

 home critics in their normal lives are but little habituated 

 to enjoy these matutinal scenes. In Africa the habit is 

 or ought to be rigid as the laws of Medes and Persians. 

 In those first few hours of daylight is concentrated the 



