CHAPTER XX 



THE SUDD 



THE Sudd as a whole represents far too big a subject to 

 be tackled in this book. It possesses manifold aspects. 

 The Sudd, for example, is one main factor in that maze 

 of colossal problems projected for the further development 

 of Egypt and of the Sudan. The great Equatorial lakes 

 vast inland seas, Victoria and Albert Nyanza are con- 

 demned (in vaticination) to be converted into humdrum 

 reservoirs. The tropical rains that deluge the " Mountains 

 of the Moon," along with the outflow from their tropical 

 glaciers, are to be collected and stored at man's disposal, 

 in order to transform a huge block of Central Africa from 

 waste and wilderness into fertile fields of cotton and corn 

 spaces only measurable in terms of tens of thousands 

 of square miles. The conception dazzles in its immensity 

 and its romance. The Sudd represents the opposition. 



In its course of some 4000 miles from the Victoria 

 Nyanza to the Mediterranean Sea, the Nile at this point 

 (2000 miles from its source, 2000 from its outflow) en- 

 counters a vast dead-level area or, at least, its gradient 

 for 400 miles diminishes to near the vanishing point. In 

 normal lands such a physical condition would result in 

 the formation of an inland sea. But here, in the tropic, 

 a superabundance of moisture and sun-heat combined, 

 stimulate a ferocious fecundity of specialised plant-life 

 that, during ages, has' trans formed what would elsewhere 

 have been an open sea, into a vast foetid region of matted 

 and rotting vegetation, submerged and surmounted by 



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