INTRODUCTORY 
3 
odd years ago the first advice given me was, “If ever 
you touch anything soft, clear." Next day my mentor, 
suddenly springing backwards, landed with iron heel 
upon my instep. He had stepped on something 
soft.” It was a puff-adder! Passing over snakes and 
scorpions, tsetse and seroots, with the whole tribe of 
flying terrors, we have Baker’s testimony that every 
bush and herb in Africa is armed with lances and 
swords, daggers, bayonets, fish-hooks, hay-forks, and 
harpoons.” His banter is, in fact, almost too mild, 
since many plants are 
doubly and trebly 
armed not only with 
penetrative spears, 
spores, and spicules, 
but with subtle re¬ 
curved thorns more 
prehensile than barbed 
wire; while in some 
species each series of 
man-traps is cunningly 
concealed beneath twin 
pairs of leaves spring¬ 
ing from the identical 
“ Thorns. 
point. The ubiquitous 
kitteir (Arabic, kittr) is a masterpiece of vicious malevo¬ 
lence, and two thousand years ago during the Punic 
Wars the allied caltrop-thorn suggested an instrument 
modelled in its own similitude that brought charging 
cavalry to a standstill. 
A certain monotony of landscape may be accounted 
a disadvantage to Sudan. For 1500 miles or more the 
waterways of Nile and White Nile traverse dead-level 
plains with never a hill to vary the endless vistas of 
sandy desert, of grass-prairie, or of grey-green forest: 
and then the Sudd! a hundred leagues of dismal papyrus. 
Such transient beauty as a Sudan landscape may display 
