ON FOOT ACROSS AFRICA.

Press, Volume LXVI, Issue 19941, 30 May 1930, Page 19

ON FOOT ACROSS AFRICA.

THE FRINGE OP THE UNKNOWN. BLOCKED BY SWAMPLANDS. (fiPscin.LT wsrrrwr wo* tub mums.) [By 11. A. Monson.] [Previou* articles in this eerie*, describing the writer's walk with.a companion Mr 3. H. Wilson, from Cape Town to Cairo, appeared in The Pkess on March £6th and 20th, April Ist, sth, 12th, 19th, 26th, May Oth and 24th.]

When wo loft Nairobi and headed north we had no clear idea of how we were going to get through to Khartoum, 2000 miles away. Tho tourist intending to make the journey can proceed northwest from Nairobi by rail, road, and "safari" route to Mongalla, in the Sudan, the extreme southern limit of Nile navigation. From there he can take a Nile steamer for the remainder of tho journey. Our method of travel being on foot, that route was closed to us, as in the southern Sudan the Nile is a mere channel through tho notorious Sudd area—the largest and, for foottravellers, the most impassable swamp on the face of the earth. One cannot wade through reeds and Sudd grass, in water that is often six-feet deep, for 600 miles. We took to tho barren deserts and pushed north as far as we could in that direction. After many trying days, enlivened by not a few exciting incidents in the rhino country, we reached the southern shores of that most romantic of all inland waters —mountain-girt Lake Rudolph. Further north Abyssinia barred our way. Our persistent requests forwarded from Nairobi to the Court of the Emperor, Eas Tafari at Addis Ababa, for permission to proceed through that country had been refused. Abyssinia was in an extremely unsettled state and no traveller's life was safe within its borders. "Shiftahs," or roving bandit bands would murder a foreigner on sight for the sake of his belongings or merely for the sport of it. That way lay suicide, the British Charge d'Affaires at Addis had warned us, and the Abyssinian Government did not wish to be embarAssed by the slaughter oi two Britishers on Abyssinian soil. If we tried to run tho gauntlet of the "shiftah" bands and we were sighted by officials we would be instantly arrested. Abyssinia did not want us. Reluctantly we ruled that country out of the list of possible routes. That meant we would have to round Lake Rudolph and pass into Turkana on its western shore. There at least we would be in British territory. A few officers in charge of a detachment of the King's African Rifles, who were engaged in guarding the northern border of Turkana against the inroads of Abyssinian slave and cattle raiders, and a civil officer In charge of the administrative outpost at Lodwar were tho only white men in the area. From them wo hoped to obtain some information which would assist ns in getting through the No Man's Land lying between northern Turkana, south-western Abyssinia, and tho south-eastern Sudan.

A Deaext Outpost. To Lodwar we trekked, passing through the wild jumble of extinct and active volcanoes around Eudolph's wild and gloomy southern shores, crossing a terrible lava field, and traversing the deserts beyond until we gained the palm-fringed Turkwell river, and sighted the mud walls of the little fort. Lodwar, perched on its pile of lava boulders in the heart of Britain's least known African province, is the dreariest, yet most romantic post on earth. Askari sentries with rifles and fixed bayonets patrol the top of its surrounding mud walls, the Protectorate flag waves over a drab collection of brown mud huts, and one English gentleman is monarch of all its surrounding solitude, and lord of its nude, barbarian, nomad people. Before it became a Civil post it was administered by the King's African Rifles. Its little graveyard holds the remains of three former officers-in-charge—one went mad and had a violent end, another was stricken down by the dread Blackwater fever, and the third died of cerebral malaria.

McKean, the District Commissioner, clad in shorts and white shirt, was playing tennis with an oflicer who was en route to an auxiliary post, when we marched in behind our camels. Finding him thus it was hard to picture him dealing out slaughter in the midst of a shrieking, fighting band of savages, and yet we had heard the account of the cool manner in which he had fought his way through the enemy at the time of the last Abyssinian raid some months before. Wo were in closed territory, but we carried passes from the authorities in Nairobi, and he had been advised of our intention to pass thsough his territory.

Warring Tribesmen. Over a "sun downer" he asked us our proposed route. We said we couldn't enlighten him, and asked if it would be possible to steal past the Havaish, or Abyssinians, along the western border of their country. He ruled the suggestion out as utterly impossible. The only exit from Turkana in that direction was through a narrow pass between Mt. Kaisenn and the Lake shore. Further west the boundless Lotogipi swamp was an impassable barrier. Moreover, to venture through the Mt. Kaiseriu pass W u W I( L b< s„ to walk into a de ath trap, rue Merille tribesmen from Abyssinia, incensed at the heavy losses that had been inflicted on them by the forces of the K.A.E. during the recent raids, were massing beyond the pass in an ugly frame of mind, and the garrison at Lokitaung, the auxiliary post guarding the pass, were expecting a raid daily. The Merille were lusting for blood, and to go in amongst them Would be to invite death. In any case he could not permit us to make the attempt.

Trackless Wastes. Abyssinia, Lake Rudolph, No Man's Land, the Lotogipi swamp—an unbrokon chain of obstacles to our advance. Of the country further still to the west nothing was known. Indeed only the most meagre details could be obtained of all that area which now lay ahead of us. There are no maps of it obtainable, for the simple reason that it has never been mapped. Sketchy charts, prepared by outpost officers of the K.A.E., and others made by Mr Hodson, the British Consul in South-West Abyssinia, contain very little information relating to any wide area of it. They indicate that all of the country to the north of Turkana is a waste of liquid mud and swamp in the wet season and a droughtstricken wilderness in the dry season. Unless we could get across it—and it extends for about 600 miles north and south, we would have to detour still farther to the west and attempt to negotiate the even worse Sudd area, or go another 1000 miles out of our way and move up through the deserts of French Equatorial Africa. From the Bahr el Ghazal Province of the Sudan —which extends out towards the French boun-

dary from the west bank of the upper Nile—to Somaliland and the Indian Ocean stretches a barrier that cannot bo pierced at any point save down the narrow ribbon of the Nile. That is why Cecil Rhodes's dream of a Cape to Cairo railway along the "All Red" route will always be a dream —unless it be a very crooked railway indeed. We were up against a bafflling problem. Our task was to walk until our goal was reached, and we had reached the fringes of a morass. Soon wo would have no land on which to set our feet.

MeKean suggested that we make across Northern Turkana to Uganda, cut through the north-eastern corner of the Protectorate, and then carry on as best we might. He promised to loan us Government donkey transport to carry our kit as far as the Uganda escarpment —and no further. We decided that the suggested course was the only one open to us. How we were forced to commandeer the Government transport, take it through Uganda and into the Sudan, and how we finally got through the swamps and so passed into the northern deserts and on to Cairo will be told in the next and concluding article of this series.