4 
SAVAGE SUDAN 
is oft illusory; those soft attractive hues are but the 
deception of tropical sunlight akin to the mirage of the 
desert. Scenes which more powerfully impress—though 
not by their beauty, unless there be a beauty in appalling 
desolation—are the Northern Deserts, the Deserts of 
Nubia, stretching for 500 miles to the northward from 
Khartoum. It was across these that in 1897 Lord 
Kitchener drove his strategic railway. Nowadays one 
surveys the whole (and better realises his difficulties) 
from the comfort of a “tropical train” running thrice 
a week! 
But though, on the Nile, contours may weary, yet 
colours oft offer compensation. So intense in these vast 
spaces is the element of light, with contrasted shade in 
equal ratio, that the brilliance of colour-effects at dawn 
and dusk transcends anything I have seen elsewhere, and 
tenfold more the power of words to portray. Such things 
no wise man will attempt — possibly even this bald 
inference exceeds the limit:— 
“What skilful limner e’er would choose 
To paint the rainbow’s varying hues, 
Unless to mortal it were given 
To dip his brush in dyes of heaven?” 
— Marmion. 
It has, however, been charged against writers on Africa’s 
wilder aspects that they have no eye for Nature’s beauties 
beyond the big-game. The reproach may be deserved; 
but it is fair to reply that, by the nature of their avoca¬ 
tion, both big-game hunter and wildfowler witness that 
spectacle of the sun “rising over the rim” (as the poetic 
define the phenomenon) some six times a week, and so 
frequent a repetition of sonorous epithets would surely 
pall. A shy suspicion even suggests itself that some 
home critics in their normal lives are but little habituated 
to enjoy these matutinal scenes. In Africa the habit is— 
or ought to be—rigid as the laws of Medes and Persians. 
In those first few hours of daylight is concentrated the 
