248 SAVAGE SUDAN 



the local savages as already described. An incident of one 

 of these massacres may be worth recording. Within sight 

 of our ship several exhausted antelopes all, so far as 

 I could see, females and young were endeavouring to 

 escape by swimming the river, when some of our own 

 crew, overwhelmed by the prevailing blood-lust, seized 

 the pinnace and set forth to cut out a poor Leucotis doe. 

 A race ensued and the savages won ; our men, neverthe- 

 less, seized the game by force. In common justice, I 

 ordered restitution to be made. The fetish of Might v. 

 Right is not confined to Central Europe ; but in Central 

 Africa the wildest savage (as I see him) at least possesses 

 the virtues of barbarism. None are wholly brutal, albeit 

 modelled in Nature's earliest and crudest mould. 



The incident typifies the relationship existing between 

 the aboriginal savage and the intrusive Sudani. Old 

 memories survive alongside a modern entente memories 

 of the era when the Arab was the conquering race ; when, 

 in Arab eyes, the pure-bred savage was nothing but dirt, 

 or the raw material for his slave-trade. Arab blood has 

 transformed the Northern Sudan. Its inhabitants are 

 now mainly a mixed cross-breed, corresponding with 

 the Swahili in East Africa. But Arab intrusion never 

 penetrated (save for slave-raiding) so far south as Lake 

 No. The aboriginal savage of this region is independent 

 of Arab ascendency ; yet he subconsciously accepts it. 

 Often the unsophisticated Shilluk, or Dinka, or Nuer, 

 attracted by sheer curiosity, would come and squat down, 

 timorous and open-eyed, beside us, trying to fathom the 

 mysteries of trapping or bird-collecting ; but he would be 

 roughly repelled, without the least reason, by our dis- 

 dainful Sudanese. Of course we intervened, to assure 

 our primitive fellow-subjects that where a Britisher was 

 all were treated alike. 



In the native villages around lay the cast-out skulls 

 of game roan, hartebeest, etc. The latter were chiefly 

 Jackson's hartebeest ; but I also noticed some that 



