THE HOME MEDICINE CHEST.

Nelson Evening Mail, Volume XLII, Issue XLII, 10 April 1908, Page 1

THE HOME MEDICINE CHEST.

.' Th« pnrpoM of th« horn* medicine chest should not b« to displace the family physician, or to take out of his handa th« work that legitimately belongs to him, but rather to afford a convenient and ready means for giving relief in cases of minor indisposition where the physician would in all likelihood not b« summoned, and in ««vere ailments for giving temporary treatment whil» awaiting his arrival. Intelligent parents who jar« «T«r watchful for any departure from the normal in their children, in adj dition to a study of the symptoms ati taching to their own ailments can often, ' if IMPEY'B MAY APPLE be at hand, prevent the development of more serious maladies. Those who already know tho worth of IMPEY'S MAY APPLE give it foremost plaoo in the medicine , cupboard, and no remedy used in the' home finds more favour than IMPEY'S MAY APPLE. Chemists and stores, price 2s 6d, or post free from Messrs Sharlonfl ana Company, limited, W«l---lington.*

/something exceptional and unique, whereof the two flags that greet us before wo enter the train at Haifa are tho striking symbol. There is the record of many stirring chapters of history, of the epitaph of many brave men's lives, black, brown, and white, in those two tall masts and thoso squares of bunting flapping in the dusty desert breeze. That is one of tho things that perhaps everybody dooa not grasp touching tho Sudan. There are some others. It is commonly understood that this territory which has been added to the sphere of British interests during the past ten years, is enormous in extent and immense in its potential, if not its actual, resources. It is twelve hundred miles long and a thousand miles wide, and it has an area of a million square miles — twothirds the size of India, larger than Great Britain, Franco, Germany, and Austria together. One province alone would hold Spain comfortably and have room to spare. Nor are these vast spaces mere waste tracts, empty squares, such as used to be left blank on those old maps of Africa which are still too often reproduced in our modern atlases. There is plenty of swamp, scrub, and desert In the Sudan. But there is also a large amount of which is actually rich and fertile, and a still larger amount which, under certain conditions, such as we are now beginning to apply, might be made so. The population of the whole territory is estimated at little more than a couple of millions. But this miserable tale is due to temporary causes which we have now eliminated. That is to say, to the ruin and havoc wrought by Mahdism. The Sudan has in former times supported a large number of inhabitants, it was even the seat of populous civilised communities; and ! it may become bo again. It Is no \ Sahara — though even the Sahara, as we now know, is not all composed of "very light soil" — into which we are bringing the light, but a country of great, though unequal, possibilities worth developing and cultivating. Different views are takon of the Sudan by thoso who may be called Sudan experts; there are few who do not hold that, in parts at least, it will be more than worth the pains that are being taken by a small knot of Englishmen, assisted by a competent body of Egyptians and natives, to bring it into prosperity. Tho tusk will be long and difficult; none more worthy and arduous has been undertaken by Englishmen of our generation. THE GREAT DESERT. You approach it, not unfitly, by the desert train, which bridges the stretch of utter barrenness thai fends Egypt from the south. This railway was, indeed, the beginning of the work which rendered tho rest possible. At Haifa the Nile bend." in a mighty loop to the west, and then turns north again brforo it resumes its proper southward course at Abu Ilamed. Wolseley, in ISB4, took the long and tedious way round the bend and over tho two cataracts it passes. Kitchener, in 1897, determined to take the short cut across the 230 miles of desert. And such desert! Africa, the world hns scarcely its equal. TreelesoS, waterless, lifeless. :t glistens on cither side — a sea of dead and that washes to the base of scarred hills, without a leaf, a patch of green, the twinkle of a mountain torrent. Through this ruined wilderness iu the hoat of the tropical summer, Girouard 's mon made the track, laid tho sleepers, and spiked down tho rails at racing pace, one gang ahead preparing the way for the next as it camo along. Between that fiory May and that fierce Decomber tho young Canadian lieutenant of Engineers got tho road begun and finished — nover loss than a mile of rail laid in a day, sometimes three miles. Often as you have read of that wonderful achievement, it is not till you are looking from the windows of the desert train that you comprehend its full meaning. Even in December, with all the comforts of the train do luxe, wicker chairs, iced drinks, smoked blass panes, and lattico Bhutters, you gasp at the heat and cough with the dust. Tho glare of the level yellow plain makes your eyes ache; you are glad when a mirage comes to rest them, so that the jagged rocks on the horizon seem floating in sheets of cool white water and the fronds of delusive palms wave mockingly on the horizon line. And you may think of the men working against time there in tho open, not in the winter, but in July — think what the dust, and tho furious sun, and the burning sand, and even the cruel irony of the mirage, must have jbeen to them. At Abu Hamed. where the Nile is touched again and there are groves and fields, you slip comfortably into a •well-kept bath they have ready for you at tho railway station, and with soap and hot water wash off tho desert dust and go back to your car, refreshed and clean, for breakfast. And then you glide past Berber, where miles of roofless mud houses tell of the ruin wrought by the dervishes before we came to stay the devastation, over the great iron bridge across the Atbara, and the braneh line to the Rod Sea coast which Girouard 's successors have built; along tho river, past Shendy and Motemmoh, and in sight of that other desert of the Nile bend which our men trod -wearily in tho fruitless advance that camo too late to save Gordon. Tho sun ha-i set, and the pall of the tropical evening rests darkly ou the land as your journey ends, and you halt, where tho railway halts — for "the present — at Khartum.