CHAPTER X 
A FIRST PRIZE OF SUDAN 
THE SADDLE-BACKED, OR NILE LECHWI 
(Onotragus mf.gaceros) 
Arabic —■ Teel. Shilluk- — Gyek 
Along the 100-mile stretch of White Nile which I have 
defined as the “Western Bend”—to be precise, that 
between the Sobat River and Lake No (latitude 
9-50° North)—the traveller enters upon the territory of 
this unique African antelope, the saddle-backed lechwi. 
At this point it is to the north bank only that search 
should be directed, since the southern shores (being- 
firm “cotton-soil”) are abhorrent to the tastes of a 
swamp-loving animal. 
The geographical range of the Nile lechwi—restricted 
as it is—is, nevertheless, not so narrow as the above 
sentence might convey, since beyond Lake No it is 
prolonged westward up the Bahr-el-Ghazal, southward 
up the Bahr-el-Jebel (or Mountain Nile) precisely so 
far as “Sudd,” or sudd-like conditions, extend on either 
waterway—say as far as Tonj to the west, to Bohr on the 
south respectively (roughly about a couple of hundred 
miles each way). For a rare and highly specialised 
species such limits are dangerously narrow, and the 
Nile lechwi deserves the utmost consideration under 
the Sudan game-laws. Luckily its preference for almost 
impassable swamp affords it some degree of natural 
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