CHAPTER XDOWN THE WHITE NILE

Mr. Churchill and Burchell's White Rhinoceros.

To shoot a good specimen of the white rhinoceros is an event sufficiently important in the life of a sportsman to make the day on which it happens bright and memorable in his calendar. But more excitement was in store for us before the night. About a mile from the spot where our victim lay we stopped to rest and rejoice, and, not least, refresh. Thetower of observation—which had been dragged so painfully along all day—was set up, and, climbing it, I saw at once on the edge of the swamp no fewer than four more full-grown rhinoceros, scarcely four hundred yards away. A tall ant-hill, within easy range, gave us cover to stalk them, and the wind was exactly right. But the reader has dallied long enough in this hunter's paradise. It is enough to say that we killed two more of these monsters, while one escaped into the swamp, and the fourth charged wildly down upon us and galloped through our party without apparently being touched himself or injuring any one. Then, marking the places where the carcasses lay, we returned homeward through the swamp, too triumphant and too tired to worry about the enraged fugitives who lurked in its recesses. It was very late when we reached home, and our friends had already hewn the tusks out of a good elephant which Colonel Wilson had shot, and were roasting a buck which had conveniently replenished our larder.

Colonel Wilson's Elephant.

The "Kenia," "James Martin," and "Good Hope" on the White Nile.

Such was our day at Hippo Camp, to which the ardent sportsman is recommended to repair, when he can get some one to show him the way.

We lingered lovingly around Hippo camp for two more days, moving to other lagoons and overflows of the river with the launch, and striking out inland in search of the great herd of elephants. But although their recent presence was on all sides proclaimed by snapped-off trees and trampled ground, and broad lanes cut through the grass, we saw none of them; and a tribe of natives who helped to carry home a variety of buck one afternoon, informed us upon expert authority that the whole herd had been alarmed by the arrival of strangers and the sound of firing, and had retired three days' journey from the river's bank. These natives—of the Lado Enclave—were gentleman-like folk, and I parleyed long with them upon their affairs. They were stark naked and very dignified, with graceful athletic bodies, long taperingwell-bred hands, and bright keen eyes. The local chief exhibited all these characteristics in a superior degree, and his natural preeminence was recognized with instantaneous obedience by his followers. We loaded them with gifts. First, quantities of meat and hides; then chocolate all round—they love sweet things—three pieces of sugar for each, at least one empty bottle per man, and tin pots and card-board boxes almost without limit. The chief showed a fine taste in all these things, and annexed at once in the Imperial style whatever took his fancy, to whomsoever it belonged. I cast about for some means of doing him especial honour, and luckily remembered that I had bought a Japanesekimonofor a dressing-gown in passing through Port Said on the journey out. With this he was forthwith enrobed, and I must say he assumed the flowing garment with that easy grace and natural self-possession which are the gifts of a wilderness life. Thus the fabrics of Cathay were by the enterprise of Europe introduced into the heart of Africa.

When, finally, with much reluctance we left this attractive place and pushed off determinedly into the stream, we lost no time inmaking Nimule. Steaming throughout the night and all next day along a broad flood contained by high and healthy slopes—now clothed with forest, now with waving grass—we approached, at about four in the afternoon, the mountains beneath which is the administrative station of Nimule. Hitherto the course of the Nile since it left the Albert Lake had been smooth and open—a broad, steady-flowing river everywhere navigable to vessels of not more than four feet draught. But at Nimule, after a reach of more than a hundred and seventy miles of unobstructed waterway, the river turns a sharp right angle and enters a long succession of granite gorges, through which it plunges in ceaseless cataract for a hundred and twenty miles. It is here at the head of these rapids that one of the great reservoirs of the Upper Nile must some day be constructed. "I spent hours," said Sir William Willcocks, the "practical mystic" of hydraulic engineering, "looking at the site, and seeing in a vision a great regulating work of the future." And indeed the exact scientific control of the whole vast system of Central African waters, of the levels of every lake, of the flow of every channel, from month tomonth and from day to day throughout the year, is a need so obvious and undisputed as to leave argument unemployed.

The change in the character of the river separated us finally from our flotilla. From Nimule to Gondokoro we must again proceed by land, and the swift and easy progress of the last few days must be exchanged for the steady grind of marches. It was this stage which had always been painted to me as the most dangerous and unhealthy in our whole journey, and I had pictured to myself eight days of toil through swamp and forest amid miasma and mosquitoes. These anticipations were not sustained. Of the disadvantages of the track along the river bank I cannot speak; but the upper road over the hills is certainly excellent and healthy, and runs throughout over firm dry undulations of a bright, breezy, scrub-covered country.

At Nimule we touched the telegraph wire again, and from the Reuter's accumulations which I studied, I learned that Parliament would not meet till the 19th of January. This gave another ten days' more rope, and I began to realize how much the spirit of these wonderful lands had taken possession of me, for itwas only with the greatest reluctance and difficulty, that I forced myself to continue my homeward journey without first turning back with the launch and circumnavigating Lake Albert. No exertion or inconvenience seemed too great to win a few more glimpses of these enchanted seas and gardens, on which I may perhaps not look again, but from whose spell I can never be free. Porters to be fed from day to day, the Sirdar's steamer waiting at the Soudan frontier, public meetings looming heavily in the far-off distance, drove me onward; and with feelings of keen and genuine regret we addressed ourselves to the march to Gondokoro.

Fording the Asua.

This was accomplished uneventfully in six stages, three of which were double marches. The country was pleasant and healthy, the scenery imposing, and, under a fierce sun, the air was cool. Each morning we started before dawn, and by noon had camped by the side of one of the tributary rivers or streams which flow into the Nile. Of these the Asua was the most important, and the picture of the longsafarifording it and coming into camp among the palm-trees of the southern bank is one which lingers pleasantly in my memory.But this I must say—somehow after Nimule the charm was broken, and none of the regions through which the traveller passes in the long-drawn descent of the Nile revive in any degree those delicious sensations of wonder and novelty which are associated with the great lakes and the kingdoms of Uganda, Usoga, and Unyoro, to say nothing of what I have not been fortunate enough to see—Toro, Ankole, the Semliki, and the Mountains of the Moon.

At the end of the sixth day we arrived at Gondokoro. The last march had been long and scorching. The moisture seemed to have gone from the air, and the vegetation, abundant though it was, seemed parched and stunted. The approaches to Gondokoro are beset by a herd of three hundred elephants of peculiar ill-fame. Nearly all the eligible tuskers have been killed. The females and young bulls are fierce and wary, and, taught by frequent contact with the white man, and protected by the sacred game laws, exercise a lawless and tyrannical power over the whole region. On every side their depredations are to be seen. Great trees pushed over in careless sport, native plantations trampled intoruin, the roads rendered precarious for the traveller, the mails often interrupted for days at a time, and occasional loss of life, are the features of this domination. And it seems likely to last a long time, for I was informed that the young bulls would not be sufficiently grown for about forty years, and even then, as the two white officers in the station are not allowed to shoot more than one elephant apiece each year, the nuisance will only gradually be abated.

Rogue elephants are of course fair game at any time, and the day before we arrived at Gondokoro, the young civil officer of the station had encountered one in a manner which he was scarcely likely to forget. For, having pursued this evil-doer for some time, he at last got into an excellent position, and was about to fire at a distance of thirty yards when suddenly the elephant, without even trumpeting rushed furiously upon him, and, paying no attention to the two heavy bullets which struck him in the head, chased the officer twice round an uncommonly small bush; and then, distracted by the spectacle of the native gun-bearer in flight, turned off after this new prey, and, overtaking the poor wretch, smashedhim to pieces with one blow of his terrible trunk. "Cet animal est très méchant; quand on l'attaque, il se défend." We reached the bungalow, which serves as the seat of government, in time to see the tusks of this man-slayer, who had died of his wounds, brought in by the tribe whose plantations he had so often ravaged.

Gondokoro, like most of the names which figure so imposingly upon the African map, is not a numerously populated town. There are about six houses and a number of native huts. There is, however, a telegraph station, a prison, a court-house, and the lines of a company of native police and King's African Rifles. Here the Nile again becomes navigable, and offers an unbroken waterway open to large vessels until the Shabluka cataract is reached, a hundred miles below Khartoum and fifteen hundred miles from Gondokoro. And here at the river's bank, seen through a tracery of palms, were the white funnel and superstructure of the Sirdar's steamer with all the letters and newspapers; and which, instead of pursuing us across Uganda, had "come through the other way."

"Had come through the other way"—it isan easy phrase to write: but how much it signifies in the modern history of Africa! Ten or eleven years ago this journey which I was now able to make so easily, so prosperously, so comfortably, would have been utterly impossible. The Dervish empire, stretching from Wady Halfa or Abu Hamed to Wadelai, interposed a harsh barrier which nothing but a stricken field could sweep away; and these long reaches of the Nile which now bore a fleet of fifty steamers were silent in the embrace of a devastating barbarism. A grim slaughter which had strewn the sands of Kerreri, twelve hundred miles to the North, withjibba-clad corpses "like snow-drifts" had blasted a passage, and the Nile was free.

Embarked at Gondokoro we passed out of the sphere of the Colonial Office into the domain of that undefined joint authority which regulates the Soudan, which flies two flags side by side on every public building, and which you can only correspond with through the British Foreign Office.

The Belgian Officials at Lado.

Gondokoro.

Henceforward our journey was comfortable, and regular. Yet though I had no official work to do and was merely coming home the shortest way, I could not traverse the Soudanwithout the keenest interest. When one has started from Cairo and padded up the Nile to Wady Halfa, crossed the desert railway to the Atbara, marched thence two hundred miles to the battle of Omdurman, one feels one has seen something of the Nile. Yet now we had followed it the other way from its source for nearly five hundred miles, and yet twelve hundred more intervened before even Omdurman was reached; and as the mighty and peerless river unrolled its length and immemorial history, the feelings of reverence, without which no traveller can drink its sweet waters, grew in intensity.

I yield to no one in recognition of the constructive and reconstructive work which Sir Reginald Wingate and his able officers have, with scanty means and in spite of grave military dangers, wrought in the Soudan. Yet it is not possible to descend the Nile continuously from its source at Ripon Falls without realizing that the best lies behind one. Uganda is the pearl. The Nile province and the Lado Enclave present splendid and alluring panoramas. Even the march from Nimule to Gondokoro is through a fertile and inspiring region. But thereafterthe beauty dies out of the landscape and the richness from the land. We leave the regions of abundant rainfall, of Equatorial luxuriance, of docile peoples, of gorgeous birds and butterflies and flowers. We enter stern realms of sinister and forbidding aspect, where nature is cruel and sterile, where man is fanatical and often rifle-armed. Cultivation—nay, vegetation, is but a strip along the river bank: and even there thorn-bushes and prickly aloes are its chief constituents. We enter two successive deserts as contrasted in their character, as redoubtable in their inhospitality, as Dante's Circles of the Inferno: the Desert of Sudd and the Desert of Sand.

Review at Khartoum.

Soudan Government Steamer "Dal."

About a hundred miles from Gondokoro the White Nile enters and spills itself in a vast and appalling swamp. Of the action of this tremendous sponge, whether beneficial in regulating the flow, or harmful in wasting the water through evaporation, nothing need here be said. But its aspect is at once so dismal and so terrifying that to travel through it is a weird experience. Our steamer, with the favouring current, made at least seven miles an hour, and, as the moon was full, we travelled night and day. Forthree days and three nights we were continuously in this horrible swamp into which the whole of the United Kingdom could be easily packed. By day from the roof of the high pilot-house a commanding view revealed hour after hour, in every direction, one uninterrupted ocean of floating vegetation spreading to far horizons. The papyrus-plant is in itself a beautiful, graceful, and venerable thing. To travel through thesudd, is to hate it for evermore. Rising fifteen feet above the level of the water, stretching its roots twenty or even thirty feet below, and so matted and tangled together that elephants can walk safely upon its springy surface, papyrus is the beginning and end of this melancholy world. For hundreds of miles nothing else is to be perceived—not a mountain-ridge blue on the horizon, scarcely a tree, no habitation of man, no sign of beast. The silence is broken only by the croaking of innumerable frog armies, and the cry of dreary birds.

The vigorous operations of thesudd-cutters have opened, and the constant traffic of steamers has preserved and improved, a channel about a hundred yards wide, winding by loops and corkscrews through the swamp. The riverpresents a depth of thirty feet along this course, and greater vessels could thread its length for nearly a thousand miles. The navigation is intricate and peculiar. Indeed, it would seem to be an art by itself. No effort is made by the Arab pilots, who alone are employed, to avoid collisions with the banks. On the contrary, they rely upon them as an essential feature of their management of the steamer. The vessel bumps regularly at almost every corner from one cushion ofsuddto the other, or plunges its nose into the reeds and waits for the currents to carry its stern round, bumps again and recovers its direction. Sometimes where the twists were very sharp we would turn completely round, not once but two or three times, and our movements round an S-curve were even more complicated. The bumps occasionally swept us out of our chairs and sent us sprawling on the deck. In this strange fashion we waltzed along at full speed for about seventy or eighty hours.

Meanwhile the Nile was accomplishing its destiny. Its vast tributary rivers, the Sobat and the Bahr-el-Ghazal, came to reinforce its flow. The miles spread out behind us in a long succession of hundreds. At length thesuddexpanses begin to contract. Distant mountains rise against the steel-blue sky in serrated silhouette, and gradually draw in upon the river. Islands of earth and trees, peaks of sharp rock break here and there the awful monotony of waving reeds. At last the banks become firm and clear-cut walls of yellow sand, fringed in places with palms and shady trees, and everywhere bristling with undergrowth of thorns. We leave the wilderness of moisture, we approach the wilderness of drought. But first, in a middle region, vast areas of dusty scrub-covered plains, not wholly incapable of cultivation in the rainy season, supporting always flocks and herds, now flank both sides of the river. The camel caravans pad slowly across them under the blaze and glitter of the heat. The mirage begins to twist and blur the landscape with deceptive waters. At intervals of forty or fifty miles are the stations of the Soudan Government, each trim and regular with its public buildings, its storehouses, the lines of beehive huts of its garrison, a tangle of native sailing-craft, and always, or nearly always, one or two white gunboats of war-time days now turned policemen of the river.

Thus we reach in time Fashoda—now called Kodok for old sake's sake; and here are clusters of Shillooks who (by request) stand pensively on one leg in their natural attitude, and smart companies of Soudanese troops and British officers, civil and military—the whole clear-cut under sun-blaze dry light, veiled only in dancing dust-devils piteously whipped by strong hot winds. All this was like a piece of the Omdurman campaign to me—the old familiar Soudan, so often made known to British minds by pen, pencil, and photograph during nearly twenty years of war, unfolded itself feature by feature. Yet we were still five hundred miles south of Khartoum!

A SHELUK AT KODOK (FASHODA).

At Meshra-er-Zeraf we stopped for two days to shoot, by the Sirdar's invitation, in the extensive game reserve, and were fortunate in securing a buffalo and various antelope. We wandered through a harsh country, of white sand and tussocks of coarse grass, more grey than green, with leafless black thorn-trees densely tangled; yet it seemed full of game. In three hours' walk on the second morning I shot a fine waterbuck, two reed-bucks, and two of a beautiful herd of roan antelope, who walked slowly down to water past our ambuscade.And, be it remembered, that the pleasure and excitement of such sport are in these lands always heightened by the possibility that at any moment the hunters may come upon game of much more serious quality—lion or buffalo; so that no one cares to be more than a few yards from his heavy rifle or give his mind wholly to the buck he stalks. Surely they are perverse, unenterprising folk who spend fortunes each year in preserving with so much artificial care, and to the inconvenience of other dwellers in a small island, well-counted herds of more or less tame deer, when in a month, and for less expense than the year's rent of their forests, they could pursue wild animals of every kind in their natural haunts and gain experiences that would last them all their lives.

I was so much elated by this jolly morning's sport and the near approach of civilized conditions—for after all, contrast is an element in pleasure—that I permitted myself to rejoice at the safe and happy outcome of this long journey, and to exult in our complete immunity from serious accident or illness or even fever. How extravagant were the accounts of the dangers of African travel! How easy toavoid the evil chances of the road! Reasonable precautions, steady exercise, regular quinine—were these not in themselves the guarantees of safety? Thus I reckoned, and with specious reasons, but in a bad hour. We were not yet at our journey's end.

Twenty-four hours' steaming from Meshra-er-Zeraf brought us near Khartoum. The character of the country was unchanged. Yellow sand-slopes drank at the Nile brim; thorn-scrub fringed the river on either side; but date-palms mingled even more frequently and numerously with the vegetation, and brown mud-built villages with brown mud-coloured populations multiplied as the miles slipped swiftly by. At length a solitary majestic tree, beneath whose spacious branches and luxuriant foliage a hundred persons might have found shelter from the relentless sun—Gordon's tree—advertised us of the proximity of Khartoum. Soon on the one bank came into view the vast mud labyrinth of Omdurman, with forests of masts rising along the shore, and on the other, among palm-groves ever clustering thicker, sprang the blue and pink and crimson minarets of new Khartoum. Khartoum—the new Khartoum, risen from its ruins in wealth and beauty—asmiling city sitting like a queen throned at the confluence of the Niles, the heart and centre of a far-reaching and formidable authority, disclosed herself to the traveller's eye. Sharp to the right turns the steamer, leaving the dull placid waters of the sovereign river we have so long followed, and shouldering a more turbulent current of clearer water, swings up-stream along its noble feudatory, the Blue Nile. And passing by the side of high stone embankments crowned by palms, the steamer enters into a modern Oriental port and city, and is soon surrounded by its palaces, its mosques, its warehouses and its quays.

The Palace, Khartoum.

Nearly ten years have passed since the Dervish domination was irretrievably shattered on the field of Omdurman, and every year has been attended by steady and remarkable progress in every sphere of governmental activity in every province of the Soudan. Order has been established, and is successfully, though precariously, maintained even in the remotest parts of Kordofan. The railway has reached the Southern bank of the Blue Nile, connects Khartoum with Cairo and with the Red Sea, waits only for the construction of a bridge to cross the river and enter the fertileregions of the Ghezireh. A numerous fleet of steamers maintains swift and regular communication along the great waterways. The revenue has risen from a few thousands a year in 1899 to considerably over a million pounds in 1907. Improved methods of agriculture have increased the wealth of the country; the prevention of massacre and famine has begun to restore its population. Slavery has been abolished, and without affronting the religion or seriously disturbing the customs of the people, a measure of education and craftsmanship has been introduced.

These great changes which are apparent throughout the whole Soudan are nowhere presented in so striking and impressive form as in the capital. A spacious palace, standing in a beautiful garden, has risen from the ruins where Gordon perished. Broad thoroughfares lighted by electricity, and lined with excellent European shops, lead with geometrical precision through the city. A system of steam tramways in connection with ferry boats, patronized chiefly by the natives, renders communication easy throughout Khartoum, and between Khartoum, Omdurman, and Halfyah. A semi-circle of substantial barracks, arranged upon a defensivescheme, protects the landward approaches. The Gordon College hums with scholarly activity—Moslem and Christian, letters or crafts; and seven thousand soldiers of all dress march past the British and Egyptian flags on occasions of ceremony.

George Scrivings.

Yet neither these inspiring facts—the more impressive by contrast with my memories of ten years before—nor the gracious hospitality of the Sirdar—more responsible than any other man for the whole of this tremendous task of reconstruction and revival—were to prevent me from taking away a sombre impression of Khartoum. As our steamer approached the landing-stage I learned that my English servant, George Scrivings, had been taken suddenly ill, and found him in a condition of prostration with a strange blue colour under his skin. Good doctors were summoned. The hospital of Khartoum, with all its resources, was at hand. There appeared no reason to apprehend a fatal termination. But he had been seized by a violent internal inflammation, the result of eating some poisonous thing which we apparently had escaped, and died early next morning after fifteen hours' illness, with almost every symptom of Asiatic cholera.

Too soon, indeed, had I ventured to rejoice. Africa always claims its forfeits; and so the four white men who had started together from Mombasa returned but three to Cairo. A military interment involves the union of the two most impressive rituals in the world. The day after the Battle of Omdurman it fell to my lot to bury those soldiers of the 21st Lancers, who had died of their wounds during the night. Now after nine years, in very different circumstances, from the other end of Africa, I had come back to this grim place where so much blood has been shed, and again I found myself standing at an open grave, while the yellow glare of the departed sun still lingered over the desert, and the sound of funeral volleys broke its silence.

The remainder of our journey lay in tourist lands, and the comfortable sleeping-cars of the Desert Railway, and the pleasant passenger steamers of the Wady Haifa and Assouan reach soon carried us prosperously and uneventfully to Upper Egypt; and so to Cairo, London, and the rest.

Philae.

My journey is at an end, the tale is told, and the reader who has followed so faithfully and so far has a right to ask what message I bring back. It can be stated in three words. Concentrate upon Uganda!

Over the greater part of the north-east quarter of Africa, British influence or authority in one form or another is supreme. But when I turn my mind over all those vast expanses, excluding only Egypt, there is no region which offers prospects to compare in hopefulness with those of the Protectorate of Uganda. The Soudan is far greater in extent and importance, and Great Britain is at no charge in respect to it. But the Soudan is clearly inferior in fertility. The East African Protectorate possesses not only enormous coast-lands of great value, but noble plateaux where the air is as cool as an English spring. Butwe already spend on East Africa—and upon the needs of its expensive white settlers—more than the whole revenue of Uganda; and yet the promise is not so bright. Northern Somaliland is a desert of rocks and thorn bushes peopled by rifle-armed fanatics, on which we spend nearly half as much as the whole annual grant-in-aid of Uganda. And between Somaliland and Uganda there is this contrast presented in its crudest form—a barren land with dangerous inhabitants; and a fruitful land with a docile people. What is least worth having, is most difficult to hold: what is most worth having, is easiest.

The union under scientific direction in Uganda (and I include in this popular name Usoga, Unyoro, Toro and Ankole, etc.) of unequalled fertility with a population of high intelligence and social quality, in a region of extraordinary waterways, must, unless some grievous error or neglect should intervene, result in remarkable economic developments. Already more than half the traffic which passes down the railway to Mombasa comes from beyond the lake. Yet scarcely any money has ever been spent on Uganda. No European roads exist, no railways have been built, nowaterfalls are harnessed, no public works of any serious description have been undertaken. A poor little grant-in-aid has barely supported the day-to-day cost of European administration, and practically nothing in cash or credit has been available for the development of the country. But it is alive by itself. It is vital; and in my view, in spite of its insects and its diseases, it ought in the course of time to become the most prosperous of all our East and Central African possessions, and perhaps the financial driving wheel of all this part of the world. It is far from my desire to disparage the East African Protectorate, or to suggest diminution of activity or support. Both Protectorates are necessary to each other and should advance together; but in view of their relative positions, and looking at the situation as it is to-day, my counsel plainly is—"Concentrate upon Uganda!" Nowhere else in Africa will a little money go so far. Nowhere else will the results be more brilliant, more substantial or more rapidly realized.

Cotton alone should make the fortune of Uganda. All the best qualities of cotton can be grown in the highest perfection, a hundred thousand intelligent landowners occupyingtwenty thousand square miles of suitable soil are eager to engage in the cultivation. An industrious and organized population offers the necessary labour. Merely at the request of the Government cotton has been planted experimentally on a considerable scale throughout Uganda. The figures of production—though of course they are only the first beginnings—show a surprising expansion. Great care is required, and steps have already been taken to secure that the quality of cotton exported from Uganda is not deteriorated or its reputation prejudiced by hasty or untutored action, that only the seeds which yield the best results should be distributed, and that no indiscriminate mixture should be permitted. The Government must control the culture. Experts must watch the ginneries and educate the native cultivator. Roads must be made to enable the crop to be marketed. The scientific organization of the cotton-growing resources of Uganda has now been definitely undertaken. A special grant of £10,000 a year will in future be devoted to this purpose, and the whole process will be supervised by European officers in close touch through the Colonial Office with the highest Manchesterauthorities and the British Cotton-Growing Association. In the opinion of the ablest observers the next five years will see a very remarkable development in cotton production, even though the means available to foster it continue to be slender.

But cotton is only one of those tropical products for which the demand of civilized industry is almost insatiable, and which can nowhere in the world be grown more cheaply, more easily, more perfectly than between the waters of the two great lakes. Rubber, fibre, cinnamon, cocoa, coffee, sugar may all be cultivated upon the greatest scale; virgin forests of rare and valuable timber await the axe; and even though mineral wealth may perhaps never lend its hectic glory to Uganda, the economic foundations of its prosperity will stand securely upon a rich and varied agriculture. A settler's country it can never be. Whatever may be the destinies of the East African Highlands, the shores of the great lakes will never be the permanent residence of a white race. It is a planter's land, where the labours of the native population may be organized and directed by superior intelligence and external capital. For my own part I rejoice that thephysical conditions of the country are such as to prevent the growth in the heart of happy Uganda of a petty white community, with the harsh and selfish ideas which mark the jealous contact of races and the exploitation of the weaker. Let it remain a "planter's land." Let the planters, instead of being the agents of excited syndicates with minds absorbed in the profits of shareholders thousands of miles away, be either Europeans of substance and character who have given proofs of their knowledge of natives and their ability to deal skilfully and justly with them, or better still—say I—let them be the disinterested officers of the Government, directing the development of the country neither in their own, nor any other pecuniary interest, but for the general good of its people and of the Empire of which it forms a part.

But if the immediate inflexion of British policy in Eastern Africa should be, without prejudice, but with precedence of other provinces, to accelerate the economic and social development of Uganda, what are the first steps to take? I might have much to say of Forestry and Agriculture; of an extended system of technical education similar to thatgiven at the Gordon College at Khartoum, here perhaps in part to be achieved through grants in aid of the existing missionary schools; of road-making, indispensable to progress, of motor-transport, and of water-power. But let me make my message brief and unclouded, and as before expressed in three words, "Build a Railway."

The clusters of colonial possessions which have been acquired on the east and west coasts of Africa, so rapidly and with so little cost or bloodshed, will unquestionably prove an invaluable, if not indeed a necessary feature of the British Empire. From these vast plantations will be drawn the raw materials of many of our most important industries; to them will flow a continuous and broadening train of British products; and in them the peculiar gifts for administration and high civic virtues of our race may find a healthy and an honourable scope. Some of these great estates, like Southern Nigeria on the west coast, are already so prosperous as not only to be self-supporting, but able to assist with credit and subvention the progress of neighbours less far advanced. Others are still a charge upon our estimates. We are annually put to the expense of grants-in-aid more or less considerable for NorthernSomaliland, the East African Protectorate, Nyassaland and Uganda. Heavy upon the finance of all the East Coast hangs the capital charge of the Uganda Railway. In no way will these charges be eased or removed except by the rise of one or more of the territories concerned to economic buoyancy, or by the growth of railway traffic down the Uganda trunk consequent upon development. Under present conditions the progress made from year to year is steady and encouraging. The charges upon the Colonial Estimates diminish regularly every year. Every year the administration of the different Governments increases in elaboration, in efficiency and consequently in cost. The extra charge is met ever more fully by the returning yield of a grateful soil. Except for the chances of war, rebellion, pestilence, and famine which brood over the infancy of tropical protectorates, but which may be averted or controlled, it would be easy to calculate a date—not too remote—by which all contribution from the British tax-payer would be unnecessary. The movement of events is encouraging; but there is one method by which it can be made far more sure and far more swift, by which all adverse chances areminimized, and all existing resources stimulated and multiplied—railways.

I would go so far as to say that it is only wasting time and money to try to govern, or still more develop, a great African possession without a railway. There can be no security, progress, or prosperity without at least one central line of rapid communication driven through the heart of the country. Where, as in Northern Somaliland, the land itself is utterly valueless, a mere desert of rocks and scrub, or where the military dangers are excessive and utterly disproportioned to any results that can ever be reaped—withdrawal and concentration are the true policy. But if for any reason it be decided to remain and to administer, a railway becomes the prime of absolute necessities. Till then all civilized government is extravagant and precarious, and all profitable commerce practically impossible. These considerations have lately led a British Government to sanction the extensive railways, nearly 600 miles long, now being rapidly constructed in Northern and Southern Nigeria; and the same arguments apply, though in my view with increased force, to the Uganda Protectorate.

It is not usually realized that the Uganda railway does not pass through Uganda. It is the railwaytoUganda and notofUganda. It stops short of the land from which it takes its name, and falls exhausted by its exertions and vicissitudes, content feverishly to lap the waters of the Victoria Nyanza. Uganda is reached, but not traversed by steam communication in any form. Yet the extension of the railway from the western shores of the Victoria to the Albert Nyanza would not only carry it through much of the most valuable and fertile country within its radius, but as I shall show could far more than double its effective scope.

It may be accepted as an axiom that in the present state of development in these African protectorates, it is scarcely ever, and indeed I think never, worth while to build railways in competition with waterways. Railways should in new countries be in supplement of, and not in substitution for, lakes and navigable rivers. No doubt direct through-routes of railway, where bulk is not broken and all delays and changings are avoided, show an imposing advantage in comparison with a mere alternation of water stages and railway links. There could be no doubt which was the better if onlyyou leave out the question of cost. But it is just this question of cost which cannot be left out, which clamorously dominates the proposition from the beginning. For first-class countries may afford first-class railways andtrains de luxe, but second-class countries must be less ambitious, and young new jungle-born countries are satisfied, or ought to be, if they get any railway at all. The differences between the best railway in the world and the worst, are no doubt impressive; but they become utterly insignificant when contrasted with the difference between the worst railway in the world and no railway at all. For observe, the comparison is not with perfect lines of European communication, nor with anything like them, nor even with a waggon on a turnpike road. It is with a jogging, grunting, panting, failing line of tottering coolies, men reduced to beasts of burden, that the new pioneer line must be compared—that is to say, with the most painful, most degrading, slowest and feeblest method of transportation which has ever disgraced the world. And compared with that, any line of steam-communication, however primitive, however light, however interrupted, is heaven.

I am endeavouring to guide the reader to a positive proposal of a modest and practical character, I mean the construction of a new railway which might be called "The Victoria and Albert Railway," although it would virtually be an extension of the existing Uganda line. This railway should traverse the country between the great lakes, and join together these two noble reservoirs with all their respective river connections. The distance is not great. Two hundred and fifty miles would exceed the largest computation; and perhaps a line of one hundred and fifty miles would suffice. If the cost of this railway were estimated, as I am informed is reasonable, at a maximum figure of £5,000 a mile, the total sum involved would be between £1,250,000 and £750,000.

The supreme advantage of making a railway debouch upon a great lake, is that every point on the lake shore is instantly put in almost equal communication with railhead. Steamers coast round on circular tours, and whatsoever trade or traffic may offer along the whole circumference, is carried swiftly to the railway. Lakes are in fact the catchment areas of trade, and it is by tapping and uniting them that theeconomic life of Central Africa can be most easily and swiftly stimulated.

Two routes present themselves with various competing advantages by which the Victoria and Albert Railway may proceed. The first, the most obvious, most desirable and most expensive, is straight across the Highlands of Toro, through the best of the cotton country, from a point on the Victoria Lake in the neighbourhood of Entebbe, to where the Semliki river runs into the southern end of Lake Albert. The second would practically follow the footsteps recorded in these pages. It does not offer a direct line. It does not pass during the whole of its length through cultivated and inhabited country. It does not reach the Albert Lake at the most convenient end. But it is far cheaper than the other. It is only 135 miles long instead of nearly 250. It connects not only the two great lakes, but also Lake Chioga with all its channels and tributaries, in one system of unbroken steam communication.

Briefly this latter project would consist of two links of railway: the first about sixty miles long from Jinja (or Ripon Falls) to Kakindu, the first point where the Victoria Nilebecomes navigable: the second about seventy-five miles long from the neighbourhood of Mruli to the Nile below the Murchison Falls and near its mouth on the Albert. By these two sections of railway, together only 135 miles in length, a wonderful extent of waterways would be commanded; to wit: 1. Thirty miles of the Victoria Nile navigable from Kakindu to Lake Chioga. 2. Lake Chioga itself, with its long arms and gulfs stretching deeply into the whole of the fertile regions to the south-west of Mount Elgon, and affording a perimeter of navigable coastline accessible by steamers, of certainly not less than 250 miles. 3. All that reach of the Victoria Nile navigable from Lake Chioga to Foweira when the rapids ending in the Murchison Falls begin again—70 miles. 4. Thirty miles from below the falls to the Albert Lake. 5. The whole of the Albert Lake shores—250 miles. 6. The Semliki river navigable (once a sandbar has been passed) for sixty miles. 7. The glorious open reach of the White Nile from the Albert Lake to Nimule—120 miles. Thus by the construction of only 135 miles of railroad, swift modern communication would be established over a total range of 800 miles: or for an addition of one-fifth to its lengthand one-eighth to its cost the effective radius of the Uganda railway would be more than doubled. Such railway propositions are few and far between.

I do not prejudge the choice of these two routes. Both are now being carefully surveyed. The advantages of the longer and more ambitious line across Toro are perhaps superior. But the cost is also nearly twice as great; and cost is a vital factor—not merely to the government called upon to find money, but still more to the commercial soundness of an enterprise which is permanently crippled, if its original capital charges are allowed notably to exceed what the estimated earnings would sustain. The question is one which will require severe and patient examination, the nicest balancings between competitive advantages, the smoothest compromises between the practical and the ideal.

But let us now look forward to a time—not, I trust, remote—when by one route or the other the distance between the Victoria and Albert Lakes has been spanned by a railway, and when the Mountains of the Moon are scarcely four days' journey from Mombasa. The British Government will then be possessed of theshortest route to the Eastern Congo. The Uganda railway will be able to offer rates for merchandise and railway material with which no other line that can ever be constructed will ever be able to compete. The whole of that already considerable, though as yet stifled trade, which feebly trickles back half across Africa by Boma to the Atlantic, which is looking desperately for an outlet to the northward, which percolates in driblets through Uganda to-day, will flow swiftly and abundantly to the benefit of all parties concerned down the Uganda trunk, raising that line with steady impulse from thestatusof a political railway towards the level of a sound commercial enterprise. In no other way will the British tax-payer recover his capital. The advantages are great and the expense moderate. Larger considerations may postpone, and the imperative need of the fullest surveys will in any case delay construction; but I cannot doubt that the Victoria and Albert railway is now the most important project awaiting action in the whole of that group of Protectorates which Sir Frederick Lugard used proudly to call "our East African Empire."

But let us proceed one step further in thedevelopment of the communications of north-east Africa. When an extension of the Uganda railway has reached the Albert Nyanza, only one link will be missing to connect the whole of the rail and waterway system of East Africa and Uganda with the enormous system of railways and riverways of Egypt and the Soudan, to connect the Uganda with the Desert railway, to join the navigation of the great lakes to the navigation of the Blue and White Niles. Only one link will be missing, and that a very short one; the distance of 110 miles from Nimule to Gondokoro, where the Nile is interrupted by cataracts. Of the commercial utility of such a linkin itselfI have nothing to say; but as a means of marrying two gigantic systems of steam communication, it will some day possess a high importance; and thereafter over the whole of the north-east quarter of the African continent under the influence or authority of the British Crown, comprising a total mileage by rail and river of perhaps 20,000 miles, uninterrupted steam communication will prevail.

The adventurous and the imaginative may peer out beyond these compact and practicable steps into a more remote and speculative region.Perhaps by the time that the junction between the Uganda and Soudan rail and water systems has been effected, the Rhodes Cape to Cairo railway will have reached the southern end of Lake Tanganyika: and then only one comparatively short hiatus will bar a complete transcontinental line, if not wholly of railroad, at least of steam traffic and of comfortable and speedy travel.

Then, perhaps it will be time to make another journey; but as the reader, who will no doubt take care to secure a first-class tourist ticket, will no longer require my services as guide, I shall take this opportunity of making him my bow.

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