Anddo-Egyptian] PROVINCIAL HISTORY 53 has proved a disappointing failure. Very large tracts of country in the central plains between Mvolo and Dem Zubeir are infertile and uninhabited . The province has never paid its way, and the annual deficit is considerable . On the other hand, all the south -western drier ironstone lands rising to the watershed are healthy, extremely fertile, and in places thickly populated. The value of the timber in this region is enormous . Its mineral wealth is an unknown quantity, but if, as may well be probable, the Nile-Congo divide is found to contain anything like the riches discovered in other parts of the great " backbone of Africa ” to the south, the prosperity of the province is 'assured. At present its communica tions are bad and its administration most difficult. Without railway facilities little can be expected in the way of mineral discoveries or general development (see p . 84 ) .

Strategically,the province is of importanceto the control of the Nile waterway, and this dictated the Government's attitude to the Marchand Mission in 1898 and the Lernaire Mission in 1904. It also supplies plentiful and admirable recruits to the Sudan army alike from its Zande and from its Dinka and other negro tribes.. Geographically, too, it belongs to the Sudan - however costly a possession — and to the Sudan only.

Darfur. - Incorporated in 1916. Its population is estimated to be a little over 1,000,000 ;" capital, El Fasher . The northern deserts in this province are barren , arid regions, capable of producing little beyond camels for the transport of merchandise and produce of the agricultural districts, which stretch from east to west across the centre of the country . Farther south and south -west ( sixty miles from Él Fasher) are the uplands of Jebel Marra, said to be See above, pp . 31 and 33. 2 Meyer (Convers . Lexikon ) states that the highest estimates place it at 1,500,000 , 2