THE SOUDAN.

New Zealand Herald, Volume XXXV, Issue 10908, 12 November 1898, Page 1 (Supplement)

THE SOUDAN.

"THE poor Soudan ! The wretched, dry Soudan ! Count up all the gains you will (writes Mr. G. W. Steevens in the Daily Mail) yet what a hideous irony it remains, this fight of half a generation for such an emptiness. People talk of the Soudan as the East; it is not the East. The East has age and colour; the Soudan has no colour and no age— a monotone of squalid barbarism, It is not a country; it has nothing that makes a country. Some brutish institutions it lias, and some bloodthirsty chivalry. But it is not a country; it has neither nationality, nor history, nor arts, nor even natural featares. Just as the Nile—the niggard Mile, refusing'himself to the desert—and for the rest there is absolutely nothing to look at in the Soudan. Nothing grows green. Only yellow halfa-grass to make you stumble, and sapless mimosa bush, dom-palms that mock you with wooden fruit, and Soudan apples that will lure you with green flatulent poison. For beasts it has tarantulas and scorpions and serieuts; devouring white ants and every kind of loathsome bug that flies or crawls. Its 'people are naked and dirty, ignorant and besotted. It is a quarter of a continent of sheer squalor. Overhead the pitiless furnace of the sun, under foot the never-easing treadmill of the sand, dust in the throat, tuneless singing in the ears, searing flame in the eye — the Soudan is a God - accursed wilderness, an empty limbo of torment, for ever and ever. Surely enough, ' When Allah made the Soudan,' say the Arabs, 'he laughed.' You can almost hear the fiendish echo of it crackling over the grilling sand. And yet— yet there never was an Englishman who had been there but was ready and eager to go again. 'Drink of Nile water,' say the same Arabs, 'and you will return to drink it again.' Nile water, either very brown or very very green, according to the season; yet you do go back and drink it again. Perhaps to Englishmen— still on the pinnacle of their civilisation— very charm of the land lies in its empty barbarism. There is space in the Soudan. There is the fine, purified, desert air, and the long stretching gallops over its sand. There are the tilings at the very back of life, and no other posture in front of them. Hunger and thirst to assuage, _ distance to win through, pain to bear, life to defend, ana death to face. You have gone back to the spring water of your infancy. You are a savage again—a savage with Eosbach water, if there is any left, and a Mauser repeating pistol-carbine, if the sand has not choked it -but still at the last word a savage. You are very unprejudiced, simple, free. You are a naked man, facing naked nature. Ido not believe that any of us who come homo whole will think, from our cosy chairs, unloudly of the Soudan."-