INTRODUCTORY 
15 
companionship of a dog - was preferable. Physically a big 
and muscular race, I frankly detest the lot. 
Climate and Health.-— Seeing that the Sudan lies 
wholly within the Tropic of Cancer and largely within the 
Torrid Zone, its climate is necessarily sultry—to put it 
mildly. We can have at home no conception of such 
degrees of heat. Yet one reads extravaganzas eulogising 
the winter climate of Sudan as comparable with that of 
an English summer. Such pretensions can only lead to 
misconception and disappointment. When at recurring 
intervals the thermometer in London rises for a day or 
two a trifle above 8o°, the newspapers go into hysterics; 
but such a temperature in the Sudan would be welcomed 
as coolness itself! In Khartoum the shade-temperature, 
even in winter, must average nearer ioo°, while 90° 
is regarded as comfortable. 1 
In the highlands of British East Africa, though they 
lie actually under the Equator, I never once remember 
a shade - temperature of ioo°, whether in summer or 
winter. Those highlands, however, have an altitude 
ranging from 5000 to 8000 feet and upwards above sea- 
level; whereas Khartoum and the whole Nilotic plain 
only claim an elevation of some 1250 feet. This explains 
the greater relative heat—a heat so dry that a slice of 
bread turns into toast ere you have time to eat it. 
In tropical Africa intense heat should of course be 
taken without saying; but it would be idle to ignore it, 
or the many other minor inconveniences incidental to the 
Torrid Zone. None of these things—neither heat nor the 
rest-—weigh with me one grain in the balance as against 
the countervailing joys; and equally the collateral 
benefits derived from each African sojourn. That latter 
1 Doubtless thermometrical readings have been registered with meticulous 
precision and quite probably may contradict these figures. But I have not 
studied them, for, in my view, they afford no really sound criterion of the 
actual suffering endured. All sorts of influences such as sun-glare, “ actinic 
rays, 55 and the like (of which I know nothing), combine to affect the issue 
far more than the mere degrees of Fahrenheit. 
