VOYAGE UP WHITE NILE 
39 
doomed, nevertheless, to failure by Ismail Pasha’s 
double-dyed duplicity—and finally to be overthrown by 
a savagery greater and yet more cruel, that of Mahdiism. 
For nearly a score of years the Sudan vanished from view 
—-submerged. 
Then in 1898, the dark epoch closed on the stricken 
field of Omdurman. To-day even a solitary traveller may 
go where he will throughout the Sudan and navigate the 
Nile as safely as the Ganges or Guadalquivir. 
The total length of White Nile, from Khartoum where 
it ends, to Lake No where it begins, is 627 miles; this 
may zoologically be subdivided into three distinct regions 
of approximately equal extents, to wit:— 
(i) The Desert-Stretch, extending from Khartoum 
to Kosti, broad and shallow, with low-lying littoral and 
innumerable islands great and small, tenanted by almost 
incredible aggregations of wildfowl. 
(ii) The Forest-Region, commencing beyond Kosti 
and extending almost to Fashoda. 
(iii) The Open Steppes of cane-brake and swamp 
that thence stretch continuously to Lake No. These 
two latter form the big-game country. 
(1) “The Desert-Stretch” 
{Khartoum to Kosti) 
White Nile above Khartoum is immensely broad, its 
actual limits often undefinable in featureless distance, or 
lost in the deceptive mirage of the desert. For nearly a 
couple of hundred miles no “scenery” exists. True, the 
mirage aforesaid daily mocks one’s sight with visions of 
mountain-range, koppie, or crag-girt loch, where nought, 
in fact, exists save immeasurable desert. Such monotony 
may weary the average traveller, yet to the eye of a 
naturalist presents features that compensate in quite other 
directions. For that very absence of concrete “scenery” 
is, in fact, almost a pre-requisite of existence to many of 
