THE SOUDAN. 23

revenues for the previous year, if he could get his ivory, gums, and other

collections north, would exceed the expenses of his province by £60,000. The proposed district of Central Soudan is the flower of the Egyptian pro¬ vinces. It includes the Provinces of Khartoum, Sennaar, Fashoda, and the equator, and the magnificent subtropical region east of the Nile, embracing the basins of the Azrek and Atbara Rivers. It is the rich sediment from the Atbara that annually renews the fertility of Lower Egypt. Prof. Keane says the basin of the Atbara is a succession of dense woodlands, rich pastures, and well-watered arable tracts. The country is healthful, and is said to contain many millions of acres of unsurpassed cotton lands. This country, according to Sir Samuel Baker and many others, needs only transportation facilities to make it a region of great commercial importance.

The proposed district of Eastern Soudan includes the well-known country along the Red Sea littoral and a part of Nubia.

Though the Egyptian Soudan is a region of great ethnical complexity, Arabs, negroes, and negroids fusing here and there, and forming a great variety of clans and tribes, nearly all the people, except the pagan Soudanese, are united in religious fanaticism and in their hatred of Egyptian rule. The time has come when civilization must gain the mastery in their land, or be content to abandon its immense resources, and the millions of poor blacks who live in and around it, to a horde of slave-hunting semi-barbarians, who will perpetually menace the white settlements south of them and the peace of northern nations as well.—New York Sun.

The region in central Africa, known as the Soudan, extends from Assouan

on the equator, and from Massowah on the Red Sea, to the western limits of Darfour, a territory 1,650 miles long by 1,200 broad.

The name Soudan is from the Arabic as wad, plural suda, black, and Beled-es-Soudan, as the Arabs call it, means literally the Land of the Blacks.

Of the desert General Colston thus writes :—“All the vast spaces east and west of the Nile valley between the fourteenth degree and the Mediter¬ ranean (over eight hundred thousand square miles) are The Desert. It would

seem at the first glance to be absolutely unfitted for the habitation of man. He who has never travelled through the desert cannot form a just idea of that strange and marvellous region, in which all the ordinary conditions of life are completely changed. It is essentially a waterless land, without rivers, creeks, rivulets, or springs. Once away from the Nile, the only supply of water is derived from deep wells, few, scanty, and far apart. Long droughts are frequent. When I explored the great Arabian Desert between the Nile and the Red Sea, it had not rained for three years. Between the twenty-ninth and the nineteenth degree of latitude it never rains at all. Water becomes precious to a degree beyond the conception of those who have never known