Part 8

Dar Guimer is hardly more than a gently undulating plain of somewhat uniform appearance, 100 miles across from east to west, and 20 from north to south. The inhabitants, few in number, if I may accept the accounts given me, seem less inclined to tillage than to cattle-raising. The soil is usually clayey, very marshy from the end of July to December, but almost completely waterless from April to July. The valleys come down fanwise from the tablelands of Tama on the west, of Zagawa on the north, and northern Dar Four on the east. They meet on a level with the Djebel Kichkich (Hadjer Moull) to form the Wadi Kadja, one of the parent branches of the Bahr-Salamat, which is one of the most important valleys on the right bank of the Shari, the main affluent of the Chad.

During the morning of June 25 we reached the southern limit of Dar Guimer at the wells of Taziriba; only 3 yards deep and flowing abundantly at all seasons, they were situated in a valley where there are no trees of any size, but an abundant growth of scrub. The wells, usually silted up, had been dug out afresh a few days previously, on the occasion of the Sultan Idriss’ visit to Dar Four. Having thus been able to water our camels and renew our own supply, we left the territory of Guimer the same evening, to go and sleep half a score of miles further on.

_Between Guimer and Dar Four._—It is interesting to notice that the tribes whose territories separate Wadai from Dar Four (Massalit, Tama, and Guimer) have always left a wide belt of uninhabited country between themselves and Dar Four. At some points its width exceeds 100 miles, while no similar solution of continuity exists between them and Wadai. It should not be concluded, as is sometimes done, that these territories are desert-like in character, for they are watered every year by the summer rains and covered with an abundant vegetation, for the most part thorny and stunted, it is true. These lands are not incapable even of settled habitation, for it would suffice to bore a few wells, around each of which men could take up their quarters in permanence, with fields of grain and cotton and pasturage for cattle. Such unpeopled regions are common in Central Africa, and each of them constitutes a neutral zone, a sort of “no man’s land” that separates the territories of two hostile tribes.

It was across a belt of this kind that our route now lay, a belt about 70 miles wide between Safé, the last village of Guimer, and Rémélé, the first of Dar Four. On June 26 a long morning march brought us to the wells of Délébé, situated at the crossing of an important route chiefly used by native traffickers on their way to barter the grain of Massalit for the salt of Dar Four at the market of Diellé, some 20 miles north of Kebkebia. The site was pleasant and covered for a space of several miles in length and 200 or 300 yards in breadth with fine harazes and kournas, which gave us the illusion of a great shady park at home; but the lack of water in the well and the way our store of eatables was running short did not allow us to yield to the temptation of resting there a day.

We had to start again in the afternoon and march till dark in order to reach, early next morning, the wells of Chibéké, whose immediate neighbourhood, so our guide told us, was infested by lions; but we had not the pleasure of seeing any. A further stage of a score of miles at last permitted us to get out of the uninhabited region and reach the Wadi Gueddara, at the point where it comes out of the mountains that mark the watershed between the basins of the Chad and the Nile.

_Western Dar Four._—These mountains seemed to be much more important than the maps and descriptions of former travellers had led me to suppose. They formed a long and rather confused chain, running approximately from north to south; and their chief summit, mount Dourboullé, some 30 miles to the east, rose to more than 7000 feet above sea-level.

I spent June 28 at the village of Rémélé, where I received a very kind letter of welcome from Lieut.-Colonel Savile Pasha, governor of the province, who put at my disposal an escort of six soldiers of the native police. I wanted to ascertain the exact position of this village, but rain fell at intervals throughout the evening and night and prevented me from observing the indispensable stars. If I was vexed, the natives were delighted, for the damp soil would enable them to sow seed for the first time that year. Next day I had only a dozen miles to cover in order to arrive at the advanced post of Kebkebia, the furthest west of the military posts in Dar Four, and during that short march I enjoyed the happy and restful feeling of the sailor who, after a long voyage, sees shining on the horizon, across the calm of the spent waters, the cheerful harbour lights. We advanced along the western foot of the chain, gradually nearing it, and noticing that it seemed to connect with the massif of Djebel Marra, of which from time to time I could see for a moment the highest peak, more than 50 miles to the south-south-east. We went along through a smiling and prosperous-looking country, already covered with springing grass, dotted with green trees, and broken here and there by rocky heights that did not rise higher than 400 feet.

The natives, scattered about their fields, watched our caravan go by without unfriendliness or sign of misgiving, and then betook themselves again to their work with the serene dignity of men who till the soil. Both in the explicit picture it makes and in suggestion, their husbandry is very different from ours. The noble gesture familiar in our western fields, of the sower sowing his seed broadcast along the furrows, is lacking on African plains. The man I was watching walked straight on, holding in both hands a hoe bent into a right angle; at every second step, without stopping or even stooping, he made with it a tiny hole, hardly more than a scratch in the tawny sand. He was followed by a child, a boy clad in a simple sunbeam, carrying a calabash of millet, and parsimoniously letting fall into each hole a few grains that he summarily covered by turning a little earth over them with his bare toes. Happy lands, where man is satisfied with hard, coarse grain, and where the earth, in return for but small pains, breaks forth into abundant harvest. Which of us shall judge between them, and say whether it is better to be exacting in one’s wants, and with great labour to attain to one’s desire, or to be content with little and find that, with hardly an effort, that little may be had?

I was welcomed on my arrival at Kebkebia by the commander, a native officer of the 13th Sudanese Battalion, Sub-Lieut. Saïd Effendi Adam, accompanied by a sergeant of Engineers, Sergeant Gasterens, R.E., in command of the wireless telegraphy post, and by the headman of the village. Thanks to their good offices, comfortable shelters were found for us, and I could procure all the food required for the use of my party. The village is of small extent, poor and dreary in appearance. It is said that the sultan Ali Dinar had the greater part of the inhabitants deported a few years ago after confiscating their property, to punish them for showing too much esteem for a certain marabout named Faki Sini, regarded in the district as a worker of miracles. The one that made the deepest impression on the natives, I was assured, consisted in being able to change colour and volume whenever he liked, and even make himself entirely invisible, which did not prevent him from letting himself be surprised and made short work of by the myrmidons of the sultan incensed at his growing prestige.

I had to stay four days in the neighbourhood of Kebkebia, the first part of the time being spent in going back to Rémélé to make arrangements for the return of my escort and hired camels to Abéché; I also hoped to make the astronomical observations I had been unable to make on the night of my arrival. But I had my labour for my pains. All four days the sky remained almost constantly overcast and the rain fell in torrents, the clouds came in great masses from the west-south-west, and, striking the mountain chain at the foot of which lie Rémélé and Kebkebia, they dissolved in rain that fell at frequent intervals, while on the other side of the chain there fell only rare and insignificant showers.

It was only the last day that I could make the planetary observations required for fixing the positions of Kebkebia, mount Dourboullé, and the summit of the Djebel Marra; this last is notably higher than the 6000 feet above the sea attributed to it by the maps of Africa: my first calculations allowed me to fix its altitude somewhere between 9000 and 9800 feet.

I left Kebkebia on July 2, starting in the afternoon in an easterly direction, skirting the foot of mount Dourboullé on its southern side. The track, cleared of scrub for a width of a dozen yards, lay along a ground rocky indeed, but presenting no serious difficulties. We came across no villages, though the country is inhabited. Here and there on the hillsides one could see stone enclosures, in groups of twenty to thirty, which till a short time previously had been villages whose inhabitants had withdrawn higher up the mountain in order to escape, so at least we were told, from the former sultan’s incessant and vexatious requisitions. They were not themselves described to us as particularly desirable, being inclined to banditism; but I can offer no evidence on the question, for they did not trouble the march of my little caravan.

On July 4, for the third and last time, I crossed the line that separates the waters of the Chad basin from that of the Mediterranean, at the Kowra Pass, which is at an altitude of about 4000 feet; then, coming down from spur to spur across the Djebel Kowra I reached the Djebel Om, a very broken region, chaotic in appearance and covered with scanty scrub, stunted, prickly, and almost leafless, where our exhausted camels found but little sustenance. From place to place we crossed recently worked deposits of salt. The salt is very much mixed with earth, and the richest beds are indicated by the swollen, cracked, and friable character of the soil. As in other salt-producing regions in Central Africa, the salt-bearing earth is washed for a longer or shorter time in washing and filtering baskets; then, when the saline solution has become concentrated enough, it is heated in clay jars, on the inside of which the salt crystallizes as the water evaporates. The product thus obtained, though impure and grey-coloured, is pleasant to the taste, and supplies a great part of the market in Dar Four and the neighbouring countries.

In the afternoon of the 5th, leaving behind us the last salt-beds of Om Bakour, we got clear away from the mountainous zone and made our way for four days across the undulating plains that stretch eastwards beyond El Fasher. The further I went the clearer grew the panorama of the chain I had just crossed. Spur after spur, fantastically shaped, extended in long succession to the north, while towards the west and the south the summits of the Dourboullé and the Djebel Marra towered above the rest of the mountains and stood out boldly against the sky, especially at dusk, a moment at which the light was particularly favourable for the observations required for determining their position and altitude. In the plain of shifting sand, dotted here and there with isolated rocks of huge size, real natural geodetic signals, the landscape stretched away monotonously, almost without trees or even grass. The fertilizing rains of the first few days of July not having reached further than the djebels I had just crossed, the sowing had not begun, and the inhabitants of the villages that succeeded one another at regular intervals down the valleys I traversed were feeling a little uneasy.

At sunrise on July 9, after passing by the hamlet of Zaïdia, I came in sight of the capital of Dar Four; it seemed to be a place of considerable extent, and to consist of thatched huts grouped by distinct quarters along the east side of a bare valley. In the uniform grey of the city I hardly noticed more than one remarkable building, white, and shaped like a tiara, and dominating the northern part of the town; and towards the centre a clump of green trees, from which emerged a construction of European style. The former was the Koubba of Zakaria Zata, the tomb of the sultan Ali Dinar’s father; the latter was the sultan’s old palace turned into the residence of the Governor of the Province.

Beyond the town I could see low lines of hills, on the north the Djebel Wana, and on the east the Djebel Fasher, at the foot of which a year before the Forian army had been routed by the Anglo-Sudanese troops of Colonel Kelly. To the south a sandy plain of a fine tawny colour stretched away to the horizon, intersected by the long, dark green ribbon of the Wadi El Ko, a sub-tributary through the Bahr el Ghazal of the Nile. Westwards various djebels of greater or less importance stood out in broken lines against the distant curtain of the great chain of western Dar Four. A few moments later I was joined by a group of horsemen: it was His Excellency the Governor of Dar Four, Lieut.-Colonel R. V. Savile Pasha, who bade me welcome and took me to the Residency, where the most cordial hospitality awaited me.

_El Fasher._—On the evening of my arrival I installed as usual the prismatic astrolabe and the box of chronometers for my daily astronomical observation, and when it was finished I was filled with a deep and intimate joy: after eighteen years of persistent effort I had at last reached the geographical goal that I had set myself to attain in Central Africa. That last observation, made in the palace yard of El Fasher, set the seal, once for all, on the liaison of the geodetic systems of the basins of the Niger, the Chad, and the Nile, for the longitude of El Fasher had just been determined by the officers of the Sudan Survey Department by the aid of the telegraph line recently established between Khartoum and El Fasher. I had to stay twelve days in this town in order to carry out, in conference with the Governor of Dar Four, a mission with which I had been entrusted by the Governor of the Territory of the Chad. This mission concerned the policing of the borderland of the two Governments, and the settlement of the claims arising out of depredations committed by the rebel tribes of Ennedi. After we had come to a complete understanding I drew up, in collaboration with Mr. A. C. Pilkington, a provisional map, on a scale of 1/1,000,000, of the part of the Franco-Anglo-Egyptian borders affected by our agreement. During all this time, need I say that I was the object of the utmost kindness and attention on the part of the Governor and the British officers who surrounded him. Their friendly reception of me remains one of my most treasured recollections of this journey.

El Fasher seemed to be a town of from fifteen to twenty thousand inhabitants, and one of the finest-looking native cities I have seen in Central Africa; it is built on sand-dunes surrounding a temporary lake that dries up a few weeks after the end of the rainy season, and in which in the dry season the natives dig hundreds of wells, the water of which is then sold at an average price varying between a halfpenny and a penny a gallon. The town stands on two sides of the lake, somewhat in the shape of a circumflex accent, open to the southward, and whose apex is marked, roughly speaking, by the Koubba of Zakaria; the eastern side of this angle is more particularly occupied by traders and natives, while the governor’s palace and the greater part of the official buildings are on the western side. Between the business town and the administrative town lies a great square, a sort of Champ de Mars where festivals, parades, and reviews take place, and where once a week the band of the battalion gives a concert.

What struck me most in this town is its well-kept and green appearance; the streets are wide, the houses in good repair and surrounded with trees (mostly serrahs). There are none of the hovels, the broken-down walls, the heaps of refuse so often found in Sudanese cities, except perhaps on the south side, where, at the time of my passing through the town, a group of Fellatas had set up a camp of dirty little straw huts in which men, women, children, and cattle sprawled in an indiscriminate heap.

The sultan Ali Dinar, who had spent part of his youth in the valley of the Nile with the Khalif of the Mahdists, had acquired there a taste for green trees, fine houses, and broad avenues. His palace had been carefully constructed. The principal building, a rectangular white house two stories high, surmounted by a terrace, opened northwards on to a garden planted with palms and lemon-trees. The rooms were large and comfortable, and from the second storey windows the Sultan could see not only the whole of his palace and his capital, but also a vast panorama over the surrounding plain, the valley of the Wadi El Ko, the mountains of Kebkebia, and even the Djebel Marra, whose imposing mass can be seen when the sky is very clear, more than 70 miles to the south-west. Other houses, less sumptuous, but more original because local in style, equally attract one’s notice in the interior of this palace, in which one loses one’s self in a labyrinth of walls, courtyards, and outbuildings. These houses are large round huts with simple clay walls, but whose roofs, admirably thatched, are often connected by long wide verandahs. These were the apartments of the princesses, light, roomy, and comfortable. Ali Dinar’s æsthetic preoccupations have been rare among Sudanese monarchs, but it must be admitted that in order to embellish his palace and his capital he had all but ruined his kingdom, reducing half the population to a sort of semi-slavery, filling his harem with concubines, distributing his subjects’ cattle among his favourites and the Arab merchants who brought him precious merchandise and weapons and ammunition sent by the Senoussists. He dreamed of extending his empire, and lent a too ready ear to the preachers of the Holy War, who, under the ægis of the Grand Senoussi and the Grand Turk, dreamed of driving French and British out of Africa. It was with him as with so many other despots: he fell through pride. Had he shown more wisdom and diplomacy he might well have been reigning still in Dar Four.

There would be many more things to say about El Fasher, but I have already dallied too long over the pleasant memories left me by my sojourn in that town. I beg to be excused inasmuch as, though I was still 1700 miles from Cairo, I considered myself as having reached the end of my journey. There only remained three weeks’ march with camels that would bring me to the railway terminus at El Obeid across an inhabited country not merely known but already organized; I must leave the pleasure of describing it to one or another of the British officers who have conquered and pacified it, and who know it better than I, who passed through it too quickly to be able to study it as it deserves.

_From El Fasher to Cairo._—I left El Fasher in the evening of 21 July 1917, passing through Um Gedada and Dam Gamad to El Nahud, where I arrived on August 4. I left again on the 6th, deeply touched by the hearty welcome of the District Inspector, Major J. G. N. Bardwell. On August 13, towards four in the afternoon, as I came within sight of El Obeid, I heard for the first time in five years the whistle of a locomotive, and its strident note was sweeter to my ears than the most classical music, for it told me that I had at last reached the gate of civilization; and the same evening, at dinner with His Excellency the Governor of Kordofan, Mr. J. W. Sagar, the sight of the graceful and charmingly dressed ladies who were present confirmed that delightful impression.

The next day was a very busy one, for I had to discharge my native escort, pay my camel-drivers, put in order, mend, and bring to the train my numerous cases of instruments, collections, and documents, in order to take on the Wednesday the bi-weekly train. I was only able to do so thanks to the unwearied kindness of the Governor and of the Garrison Commander, Major T. S. Vandeleur, D.S.O.

On August 15, at 7 o’clock in the morning, I took the train for Khartoum. The faithful blacks who had come with me all the way from Borkou were filled with gaping wonder at the sight of the long heavy string of carriages moving by itself. His Excellency the Governor and the Garrison Commander had come to the station to wish me a happy end to my travels, and to see that I had everything I wanted. Let me be allowed here to express once more my lively gratitude!

Then followed two long days in the train across the wide plains of Kordofan, the crossing of the White Nile by a monumental bridge, then the arrival on the Blue Nile at Sennar, where passengers were waiting who had come from the Upper Nile; then Wad Medina in the afternoon, and finally, in the middle of the night, Khartoum.

I stayed a week in Khartoum, where I was the guest of the Civil Secretary, Feilden Pasha, and Dr. P. S. Crispin, Director of the Medical Service. It was an enchanting week that I spent in that pearl of the Sudan, which is already visited by many a tourist, so great was the consideration shown me by my hosts and by the high officials and officers of the capital.

I left Khartoum on August 24, arrived in Cairo in the morning of the 28th, and on the 30th had the honour of being presented at Alexandria by the French Diplomatic Agent to His Excellency the British High Commissioner in Egypt, Sir Reginald Wingate.

As there was no boat ready to start for France, I was able to satisfy my impatience to see an up-to-date fighting front by a visit to the British front lines opposite the Turkish trenches which at that time defended Gaza. Then, returning to Alexandria, I embarked for Malta. From there I reached Syracuse, and thence, by Messina, Naples, Rome, and Modane, I arrived on 1 October 1917 in Paris, and from there a few weeks later I joined the French front.

=10. Conclusions.=