248 
SAVAGE SUDAN 
the local savages as already described. An incident of one 
of these massacres may be worth recording. Within sight 
of our ship several exhausted antelopes—all, so far as 
I could see, females and young—were endeavouring to 
escape by swimming the river, when some of our own 
crew, overwhelmed by the prevailing blood-lust, seized 
the pinnace and set forth to cut out a poor Leucotis doe. 
A race ensued and the savages won ; our men, neverthe¬ 
less, seized the game by force. In common justice, I 
ordered restitution to be made. The fetish of Might v. 
Right is not confined to Central Europe; but in Central 
Africa the wildest savage (as I see him) at least possesses 
the virtues of barbarism. None are wholly brutal, albeit 
modelled in Nature’s earliest and crudest mould. 
The incident typifies the relationship existing between 
the aboriginal savage and the intrusive Sudani. Old 
memories survive alongside a modern entente —memories 
of the era when the Arab was the conquering race ; when, 
in Arab eyes, the pure-bred savage was nothing but dirt, 
or the raw material for his slave-trade. Arab blood has 
transformed the Northern Sudan. Its inhabitants are 
now mainly a mixed cross-breed, corresponding with 
the Swahili in East Africa. But Arab intrusion never 
penetrated (save for slave-raiding) so far south as Lake 
No. The aboriginal savage of this region is independent 
of Arab ascendency; yet he subconsciously accepts it. 
Often the unsophisticated Shilluk, or Dinka, or Nuer, 
attracted by sheer curiosity, would come and squat down, 
timorous and open-eyed, beside us, trying to fathom the 
mysteries of trapping or bird-collecting; but he would be 
roughly repelled, without the least reason, by our dis¬ 
dainful Sudanese. Of course we intervened, to assure 
our primitive fellow-subjects that where a Britisher was 
all were treated alike. 
In the native villages around lay the cast-out skulls 
of game—roan, hartebeest, etc. The latter were chiefly 
Jackson’s hartebeest; but I also noticed some that 
