CHAPTER XXII 



KHARTOUM AND OMDURMAN 



THE outstanding feature of modern Khartoum is its 

 obvious resolve to cast outboard the Dervish ideal and 

 to substitute therefor a British regime. How far this 

 object has progressed is patent to all who remember 

 the very brief annals of the modern city barely 

 past its majority. True, there remain vacant, imposing 

 sites for squares, and palm-bordered boulevards which 

 yet await the houses that will eventually adorn them ; 

 while kites and vultures still supplement, though they 

 no longer fulfil, the duty of public scavengers. The latter 

 fact, however, can hardly be held a reproach, since it is 

 little more than two centuries ago (vide Macaulay) that 

 the kite performed that office in the streets of London. 



It is graceless to criticise; but surely that noble, league- 

 long Avenue that fronts Khartoum's historic riverside 

 deserves some more resonant title than " Embankment 

 Street" 1 Oh, the poverty of imagination! And in any 

 case, the term is a misnomer, since an embankment 

 (being unilateral) is no more a "street " than Trafalgar 

 Square is a village green. 1 



Cities as such, whether ancient or modern, lie out- 

 side the scope of this book. But the traveller in Sudan 



1 During one early morning's ramble around Khartoum, we suffered a 

 double shock. The first was in finding a dead man drowned in Blue Nile 

 gruesome enough before^breakfast; but the second shock was distinctly 

 worse. At the corner of a block of riverside buildings we read this 



inscription : 22 STREET Now let the municipal authorities of 



Khartoum rise fitly to their occasion ! 



299 



