CHAPTER XXVII

CONCLUSION

The Nile quest is practically ended. It may be safely said that every important branch or affluent or lake-source of this the longest river in Africa (very nearly the longest in the world) has been discovered, named, and partially or completely mapped. The only portion of the Nile basin which presents any noticeable blank on the map is the unknown district--some say of swamp alternating with arid steppe--which stretches like a tongue of white in our charts between the tributaries of the Mountain Nile and the Giraffe on the west, and the affluents of the Sobat on the east. In all probability whilst these lines are written and printed this blank is being filled up by industrious surveyors sent out by the Anglo-Egyptian government of the Sudan.

Fate has ordained that the entire basin of this river and its tributaries (with the trifling exceptions of the upper waters of those which rise within the political limits of Abyssinia, a portion of the extreme source of the Nile (the Kagera), of Lake Albert Edward, and of the Semliki) should come under the political control of Great Britain. We have, therefore, cast our ægis over one of the most wonderful regions, in some respects one of the most productive portions, of Africa.

On the north there is the oldest country in the world, so far as history goes,--Egypt, with its ten millions of Egyptians, Arabs, Europeans, and Nubians; its cotton and wheat, maize, barley, beans, sugar-cane, dates, rice, and clover; its petroleum, gold, and emeralds in the eastern desert, and its alum and soda in the Libyan wastes; Egypt, with its European or Mediterranean fauna and flora.

Then comes Nubia, producing little at present but fierce men of mixed Hamitic, Semitic, and Negro blood; then the richer countries of Darfur, Kordofan, Sennar, Bogos, Kasalá, and Galabat. Here there is no lack of trade goods,--copper, camels, asses, and, above all, acacia gum. The vegetation in these lands is no longer that of the Mediterranean. It is African. On the hills above three thousand feet, appear dracænas and euphorbias. In the lowlands there are baobabs, acacias, giant fig-trees, wild-date palms, and the branching hyphæne. Here begins the great fauna of Africa,--baboons, elephants, antelopes, lions, zebras, cheetahs, leopards, spotted hyænas, wild asses, rhinoceroses, giraffes.

[Illustration: NUBIA: A “WASHOUT” ON THE SUDAN RAILWAY.]

Farther south comes the influence of the regular equatorial rains. The steppe gives place to grasslands, and, above all, to marshes,--hopeless marshes of papyrus, of Phragmites reeds, of the fleecy _Vossia_ grass, of the floating _Pistia stratiotes_, the amaranth, the water-lily, and the ambatch (a gouty bean with orange-coloured blossoms). In these marshes swarm the hippopotamuses and crocodiles, long banished from Egypt proper. Here strides and poses the extraordinary _Balæniceps rex_ or Whale-headed stork. Sacred ibises, spoonbills, stilts, herons, marabou storks, white storks, black storks, saddle-billed storks, tantalus storks, Egyptian geese, spur-winged geese, knobnose geese, ducks of many kinds frequent this dreary land, that, save to birds, has no horizon; for everywhere the view is shut in with walls of reed and rush and amphibious bush. Yet away beyond the marshes--marshes which are really hidden lakes and mighty rivers with false banks of floating vegetation--is a grassy country dotted with stony hillocks, if one travels far enough from the river, and inhabited by naked Nile Negroes. These are tall black men with long, thin shanks, and the gait and attitudes of wading birds. They are cattle-keepers, above all, and their vast unseen herds beyond the marsh lands breed and send forth periodically for the devastation of Africa those cattle plagues which recur at intervals of a few years.

[Illustration: TROPICAL FOREST AT ENTEBBE, ON THE NORTH-WEST SHORES OF VICTORIA NYANZA,

(Now turned into Botanical Gardens.)]

To the southwest of Marshland begins an attractive, even beautiful, park-like country of rolling, grassy downs, interspersed with fine trees of ample foliage, with belts of forest along the rivers. Beyond the parklands rises that tremendous tropical forest which passes thence uninterruptedly over the water-parting into the basin of the Congo. This tropical forest, only to be rivalled in luxuriance by that of the Amazons in South America, stretches in a crescent curve along the southwestern edge of the Nile basin to Ruwenzori, and, with a few interruptions, into Unyoro, Uganda, and the northern shores of the Victoria Nyanza. On the plateaux lying to the northeast of the Victoria Nyanza are other areas of dense forest, but not always tropical in character,--forests consisting of great conifers and tree-heaths, which reappear on the high mountains of Abyssinia.

To the immediate south of the marshy country appears more parkland on either side of the Mountain Nile, and in the countries of the Acholi, the Lango, and the Lotuka. Beyond this parkland is the great area of marshes between the Victoria Nile and Mount Elgon. North of Elgon the parkland becomes more arid. East and west of the Victoria Nyanza are beautiful and healthy plateaux ranging from six thousand to ten thousand feet in altitude, and highly suggestive of Europe and the Cape of Good Hope in their vegetation.

Between the watershed of Rudolf and that of the White Nile are many mountains, but as one proceeds northward in the direction of the Sobat, the country is increasingly parched and sandy where it is not stagnant marsh.

Nileland contains within its limits the highest point of the African continent,--the culminating peak (whichever it may be) of the Ruwenzori range, a ridge which presents some thirty miles of snow and glaciers, and perhaps attains twenty thousand feet in supreme altitude. South of Ruwenzori, and still partly within the Nile watershed, is the Mfumbiro group of volcanoes, two of which possibly exceed an altitude of thirteen thousand feet. Away to the northeast of the Victoria Nyanza is the great extinct volcano of Elgon, over fourteen thousand feet in height, while the mountains of Abyssinia, where the Sobat, the Blue Nile and its tributaries, and the Atbara take their rise, reach in places to altitudes of sixteen thousand feet, and are capped with patches of perpetual snow. Nileland, therefore, offers a wonderful range of climate, temperature, and vegetation.

Its fauna comprises the most interesting, the biggest, and the handsomest of African beasts. And its human races include nearly every type of Negro and Negroid,--Congo Pygmies, Turkana giants, Masai like Greek athletes and Balega[118] like apes, long-shanked Dinka and Shiluk, short-limbed Lendu, burly Baganda, handsome Bahima, ugly Berta and Shangala, bearded Nyam-nyam and womanish Madi; the clothed, curly-haired Galas and the absolutely nude Nilotic Negroes. In Egypt are pure Caucasians; in Nubia and Abyssinia, in the lands between the Nyanzas, are people of this regal stock variously mixed with antecedent Negro.

The Nile has been the main route by which in ancient times the Caucasian invaded Negro Africa, the once exclusive path by which the white man’s cultivated plants and domestic animals reached the torrid lands and dense forests where the Negro, before the Caucasian touched him, lived in the condition of the semi-beast. No Negro race cared whence the Nile came or whither it flowed. Interest in geographical problems, as it was remarked in the first chapter of this book, is almost the exclusive heritage of the Caucasian. This is the human race which for some three thousand years has felt first a flickering curiosity, latterly an intense desire, to wrest the secret of the Nile sources from the heart of Africa. Its aim is accomplished. The main features of the Nile system are placed on the maps of civilised men, are known to intelligent Egyptians, Arabs, Indians, and Abyssinians.

The Nile has been the Caucasian’s first and easiest way across the desert to Real Africa before the ocean could be navigated. The Nile basin, moreover, offered to the more sensitive white man elevated areas, oases in a land of malarial fever, wherein he could make some home or settlement, south of the Tropic of Capricorn, not too dissimilar in climate and temperature to the lands of temperate Europe and Asia. From the vantage-ground of Abyssinia, of the Nandi and Ankole plateaux, of the Mediterranean Delta of the Nile, the Caucasian may still direct the education of the Nile Negroes and permeate increasingly these black and bronze-skinned, woolly-haired backsliders from human progress with Caucasian blood, energy, and love of knowledge, till the Nile Negro himself grows interested in the past history of Nile discovery.