LANDSCAPE IN THE SUDAN 49 of the qualities of merissa in a still more pronounced way than had occurred at the start of my journey from Singa on the Blue Nile, where my otherwise more or less virtuous cook had become a chronic nuisance to the neighbourhood.

To the average Englishman who has not strayed from the hedge-confined country of his own land, it is a little difficult to form a mental picture of the unrestricted wildness of the African landscape. Yet I have seen spots in Scotland which might well have been in the Sudan, and stretches of parklike, finely-timbered land in Mid-Africa which might equally well have surrounded one of the stately homes of England.

In Rhodesia I have suddenly emerged from thick bush into such an expanse of country, the long, sundried, yellow grass evenly covering an undulating park, dotted, as if by an expert landscape gardener with clumps of trees or wide- spreading single ones in elegant positions.

But in the Sudan such spots are rare. The country, as a rule, is either too dry during a great portion of the year, or, farther south, in the great swampy regions, too wet. It is annually devastated by destructive grass fires, which scorch and stunt the trees, leaving the deep-seated grass roots unharmed, and manured by the salts of the burnt ash.

So the greater part of the bush consists of numberless small, straggly specimens of the various acacias, sunt, hashab, talh, and kuk, which produce gum arabic ; and the fruit-trees (sic), lieglig and 4