CHAPTER XXII 
KHARTOUM AND OMDURMAN 
The outstanding - feature of modern Khartoum is its 
obvious resolve to cast outboard the Dervish ideal and 
to substitute therefor a British regime. How far this 
object has progressed is patent to all who remember 
the very brief annals of the modern city *— barely 
past its majority. True, there remain vacant, imposing 
sites for squares, and palm-bordered boulevards which 
yet await the houses that will eventually adorn them; 
while kites and vultures still supplement, though they 
no longer fulfil, the duty of public scavengers. The latter 
fact, however, can hardly be held a reproach, since it is 
little more than two centuries ago (vide Macaulay) that 
the kite performed that office in the streets of London. 
It is graceless to criticise; but surely that noble, league- 
long Avenue that fronts Khartoum’s historic riverside 
deserves some more resonant title than “Embankment 
Street ”? Oh, the poverty of imagination! And in any 
case, the term is a misnomer, since an embankment 
(being unilateral) is no more a “street” than Trafalgar 
Square is a village green. 1 
Cities as such, whether ancient or modern, lie out¬ 
side the scope of this book. But the traveller in Sudan 
1 During one early morning’s ramble around Khartoum, we suffered a 
double shock. The first was in finding a dead man—drowned in Blue Nile 
—gruesome enough before breakfast; but the second shock was distinctly 
worse. At the corner of a block of riverside buildings we read this 
inscription:—22 Street .Now let the municipal authorities of 
Khartoum rise fitly to their occasion! 
