The north-eastern quarter of the continent of Africa is drained
and watered by the Nile. Among and about the headstreams and
tributaries of this mighty river lie the wide and fertile provinces of
the Egyptian Soudan. Situated in the very centre of the land, these
remote regions are on every side divided from the seas by five hundred
miles of mountain, swamp, or desert. The great river is their only
means of growth, their only channel of progress. It is by the Nile
alone that their commerce can reach the outer markets, or European
civilisation can penetrate the inner darkness. The Soudan is joined to
Egypt by the Nile, as a diver is connected with the surface by his
air-pipe. Without it there is only suffocation. Aut Nilus, aut nihil!

The town of Khartoum, at the confluence of the Blue and White Niles,
is the point on which the trade of the south must inevitably converge.
It is the great spout through which the merchandise collected from a
wide area streams northwards to the Mediterranean shore. It marks the
extreme northern limit of the fertile Soudan. Between Khartoum and Assuan
the river flows for twelve hundred miles through deserts of surpassing
desolation. At last the wilderness recedes and the living world broadens
out again into Egypt and the Delta. It is with events that have occurred
in the intervening waste that these pages are concerned.

The real Soudan, known to the statesman and the explorer, lies far
to the south--moist, undulating, and exuberant. But there is another
Soudan, which some mistake for the true, whose solitudes oppress the
Nile from the Egyptian frontier to Omdurman. This is the Soudan of the
soldier. Destitute of wealth or future, it is rich in history. The
names of its squalid villages are familiar to distant and enlightened
peoples. The barrenness of its scenery has been drawn by skilful pen