CHAPTER XX 
THE SUDD 
The Sudd as a whole represents far too big a subject to 
be tackled in this book. It possesses manifold aspects. 
The Sudd, for example, is one main factor in that maze 
of colossal problems projected for the further development 
of Egypt and of the Sudan. The great Equatorial lakes 
—vast inland seas, Victoria and Albert Nyanza—are con¬ 
demned (in vaticination) to be converted into humdrum 
reservoirs. The tropical rains that deluge the “ Mountains 
of the Moon,” along with the outflow from their tropical 
glaciers, are to be collected and stored at man’s disposal, 
in order to transform a huge block of Central Africa from 
waste and wilderness into fertile fields of cotton and corn 
—spaces only measurable in terms of tens of thousands 
of square miles. The conception dazzles in its immensity 
and its romance. The Sudd represents the opposition. 
In its course of some 4000 miles from the Victoria 
Nyanza to the Mediterranean Sea, the Nile at this point 
(2000 miles from its source, 2000 from its outflow) en¬ 
counters a vast dead-level area—or, at least, its gradient 
for 400 miles diminishes to near the vanishing point. In 
normal lands such a physical condition would result in 
the formation of an inland sea. But here, in the tropic, 
a superabundance of moisture and sun-heat combined, 
stimulate a ferocious fecundity of specialised plant-life 
that, during ages, has transformed what would elsewhere 
have been an open sea, into a vast foetid region of matted 
and rotting vegetation, submerged and surmounted by 
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