Page:The empire and the century.djvu/859

 and the Nile swishes round the bend, and has left this outpost of Empire in the purple haze.

I see a hundred miles of mere—great wastes of weed through which the Nile rushes down narrow lanes between wide, placid pools, where the heavy thud of a leaping 7-foot fish and the sad cries of water-birds alone break the silence of the evening—a mere set in a long trough of sun-shorn hills, where trees burst like guns and the brown grass shrivels and drifts, ash-like, on the breeze; where heat is heat, and aged rhinos wander unceasingly through dry belts of thorn; where Shulis and Lures—curious Nilotic men—sit meditating in the sun—a sun round, red, and glowing like a furnace door; an awful sun, a sun that shaves the earth and blisters the very rocks. Here, nightly, fearful storms brew, and the sun-tortured hills are riven and seared by lightning, till the whole district wears an aged look quite in keeping with the rhinoceros, who is its chief denizen.

Then, plunging through eighty miles of rapid and cascade, the Nile eddies beneath Bedden. Here are the outposts of the Belgian King, and blue-uniformed cannibals practise the goose-step to the accompaniment of interminable bugle blasts. Here all living things have crowded to the English bank, and cringe in fear of the teeth of the 'Billygee.' Sardine-tins glisten on the banks, and absinthe-bottles drift upon the pools, and hell is loose, and Ostendwards a king draws cent per cent.

Creeping past the mushroom rock of Redjaf, the hills of Lado and Gondokoro, a land still vaguely reminiscent of the 'Forty Thieves,' where Baker Pasha beat his great English heart into the trust of negrodom; where Emin lived and dreamed; where Speke passed and Gordon strove before the long hiatus when Mahdism came—a land of great English memories tossed by a Foreign Minister to the howitzers and cannibal hordes of the Congo State—the now mighty flood pours through a thousand channels into the world of swamp.

A world of swamp indeed!

Thirty thousand miles of water, weed, mud and