# From Cairo to the Soudan Frontier

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FROM CAIRO TO THE SOUDAN FRONTIER
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Printed by Ballantyne, Hanson & Co. At the Ballantyne Press
PREFACE
The sketches here published pretend to no other character than that of a record of impressions derived from a couple of brief tours in Egypt during the winters of 1893-4 and 1895-6. But it is hoped that their interest, such as it is—and some interest can hardly fail to attach to any truthful description of one of the most interesting countries in the world—may have been to some extent enhanced by the events of which the Nile Valley has subsequently become the scene.
I have attempted in these pages to portray to the best of my ability the life and character, the aspect and the manners of ​that ancient and unchanging people, for whose destinies England, the last of many great Empires to undertake that duty, has by so strange a series of chances become responsible. At the time when my latest chapters were penned some weeks had yet to pass before the orders were given for the forward movement into the Soudan. But advance was already "in the air." Workmen were busy repairing the iron-plates of the armoured transports at Shel-lâl; signs of unwonted military activity, indefinable but unmistakable, were to be discerned at Wady Haifa; the restlessness of the Dervishes, especially as evidenced by their recent audacious and successful raid on a Nubian river village, well within the line of the English defences, was in all Egyptian mouths. Enough was to be seen to fill the mind of the least expert of civilians with suspicions which it needed only ​the obstinate taciturnity of the military authorities to confirm.
Nor apart from these immediate premonitions of a forward movement could even the civilian aforesaid have failed to appreciate the cogency of the standing arguments for an advance. Every league of the Nile Valley from Assuân to Wady Haifa, and every line in the conformation of Wady Haifa itself is eloquent of them. For near two hundred miles of water-way you travel through a land of almost desolation; often between rocks or desert reaching to the very river brim, never with more than the narrowest ribbon of tilth or herbage interposed between them and the stream. At the end of your journey you come to a so-called frontier "post," which might as well have been anywhere else in the wide wilderness for all that Nature has done to help man strengthen it. Another ten score ​miles beyond it spreads a fair and fruitful tract of country, worth defending and easier to defend, which was once in possession of the owners of Assuân and Wady Haifa. The sight and knowledge of these three things must impress even the most careless or prejudiced of English observers. The truth becomes plain to him, perhaps, for the first time that what was done by Mr. Gladstone's Government in obedience to the real or supposed exigencies of the military and financial situation in 1884, was to compel Egypt to abandon a richly fertile and readily defensible district, in order to draw an essentially arbitrary and unnatural frontier across a long and narrow strip of well-nigh worthless river-valley, whose inhabitants it is, from that position, almost impossible to protect.
The doubts which exercise the patriotic minds of Mr. Labouchere and his party as ​to the expediency of effacing this artificial and mischievous delimitation seldom trouble those who have visited the country for themselves, The question of thrusting back the ever menacing hordes of marauding barbarism from those marches of African civilisation of which we have become the wardens—nay, the greater question of reconquering the vast region over which the beginnings at least of that civilisation once extended—does not delay them long. They think of the thousand miles of peace and industry, and simple contentment, and pathetic defencelessness through which they have passed; of the flood of savagery that beats for ever upon those ill-protecting barriers, and of the deeps of human misery that lie beyond; and they can have no doubt of the direction in which the duty of England points. Perhaps then, as has been said, the pages which follow may have ​a strengthened claim on the attention of the reader as from the pen of one who and whose fellow-travellers were among the last of the detachments of English tourists to visit Wady Haifa before the advance, and to look forth across its frontier over that far-stretching waste of anarchy into which the troops of Egypt, under the leadership of her protector, are now penetrating: under, it is true, the grudging and malevolent eyes of English Radicals, but with the hearty God-speed of every friend of order and good government and human happiness throughout the English-speaking world.
H. D. T.
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CONTENTS
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