24 
SAVAGE SUDAN 
Khartoum, Kassala, and Kordofan; and naturally that 
climatic favour is reflected in the relative fauna and 
flora. Trifling-, admittedly, is the difference: it may be 
diagnosed as representing that between a minus quantity 
and a minimum. 
There suggests itself a sort of weird grandeur in the 
very immensity of these vast voids — even a tinge of 
romance as horizon after horizon reveals a changeless 
panorama to eyes that ache with the glare of sun-blistered 
sand. From sunrise to sunset there may come no very 
palpable change in aspect, no relief nor hope of relief 
that is not merely the mocking deceit of the mirage. 
That is the Sahara. But examine these deserts in closer 
detail and it will be found that separate landscapes, how¬ 
ever arid, may display distinct individualities, since there 
are “qualities” which differentiate even the sternest 
sterility. 
To describe on paper the beauties of a more or less 
featureless void would certainly stretch-out the resource 
even of a master of words. I will only risk these half- 
dozen lines which I scribbled down on the summit of one 
of the rocky “jebels”—or koppies—which, like islets in 
an ocean, stud the desert plains:—“From this ioo-foot 
elevation we command a wide sweep of typical wilderness. 
The colour-effects alone, combined with ‘distances’ that 
are Turneresque (but not to be expressed in terms), 
forbid any unqualified verdict of condemnation. Low 
sand-ridges radiate afar in irregular curves like rollers 
in the Atlantic, their crests spangled with black volcanic 
debris strewn in ordered disarray, Save a few stunted 
mimosas and tufts of starveling grass that show up even 
paler than the sand itself, no vestige of vegetation can 
be discerned, and the wide intervals are often carpeted 
with stones. One of the nearer stone-flats being com¬ 
posed of the dark volcanic lava aforesaid—but embedded 
amidst yellow gravel—gives (under the tropical sun) the 
illusory effect of a stretch of purple heather! Another 
