EL OBEID II 



ings the native town lay in a hollow. At the time I 

 speak of it was a real native village of importance, 

 built of straw with practically only two streets, that of 

 the market with the low mud-built, flat-roofed houses, 

 occupied principally by Greek, Italian, and Syrian 

 merchants, and the other cutting the town in two. 

 Each side of the latter was a labyrinth of tortuous 

 paths. 



Not long after my departure a British officer, enjoy- 

 ing a brief authority, ordered the then town to be 

 erased and a new one raised on the same site, cut 

 by good roads in all directions. Moving a house 

 in the Sudan, where ten men lift off a roof and carry 

 it where they will without a moment's thought, does 

 not, like a similar if more difficult event in Winni- 

 peg, produce a photograph in all illustrated papers. 

 Nevertheless, considering that there were supposed to 

 be 10,000 inhabitants to be disturbed, the feat speaks 

 marvels for this officer's hold over them, as also for 

 his pluck in backing his luck as he did. Apart from 

 the fact that it might have caused a local rising, one 

 or two complaints, anonymous in all probability, 

 might have caused his removal as a firebrand. 

 Let us imitate him in ignoring the " might-have- 

 beens," and see in El Obeid a town worthy of 

 being the capital of so fine a province as Kordofan. 

 The legend attached to the locality is this. Some 

 merchants were travelling from the river to the west, 

 and near this spot lost a white she-donkey. They 

 tracked it to this depression, and one of them, spying 

 her, cried, " There she is, the white one (el beida)." 



