PREFACE

is the fashion to take for granted that the British have done,

and are still doing, great things in the Sddan, because of our

tradition that it is the duty of every Briton, whether he be trader,

traveller, sailor, soldier, or administrator, to do great things in

foreign lands. Notwithstanding the letters to the press from able

correspondents such as Mr. Knight and Mr. Fred Villiers, to say

nothing of Government publications, few have taken the trouble

really to think out and to understand the magnitude of the diffi-

culties which have had to be overcome and the work which has

been done by a mere handful of British officers in the Sudan.

Those who now visit that country, and pass over its howling

deserts in a train de luxe, can form no idea of the state of misery

to which the country had been brought within a space of fifty years

by the misrule of its former masters, who sat comfortably in

Cairo, and despatched one Governor-General after another to Khartum to give effect to a policy the chief object of which was

to " squeeze " the native and to support the slave trade. During

the five months which I spent in the Province of Dongola in 1897

I saw the most abject misery everywhere. Four-fifths of the

population had been destroyed, the greater part of the land had

gone out of cultivation, the palm trees had been so greatly

neglected that the date crops barely supported the remnant of

the population which struggled for a living, most of the water-

wheels had been burnt or were broken, and the Dervishes had

eaten the cattle which had worked them. There was no trade

and no money, the young men had been slain in the wars of the

Mahdi and Khalifa, and the young women had been carried off to

fill the harims of the Bakkara.

The condition of the country between Abu Hamed and Khartum was even more terrible, as I saw for myself when I

visited the Island of Meroe three months after Lord Kitchener had captured Omdurman. Every here and there a few wretched

people, chiefly old men and women, had gathered together and

were trying to form a village, and how or on what they lived were

things to marvel at. Thorns and briars and brambles had taken

possession of nearly all the land which had been formerly fertile

lields, and the few natives who had straggled back from their

flight before Mahmdd sowed the seed for their scanty crops on

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