The River War - An Account of the Reconquest of the Sudan

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CHAPTER I: THE REBELLION OF THE MAHDI



The north-eastern quarter of the continent of Africa is drained and
watered by the Nile. Among and about the headstreams and tributaries
of this mighty river lie the wide and fertile provinces of the Egyptian
Soudan. Situated in the very centre of the land, these remote regions
are on every side divided from the seas by five hundred miles of
mountain, swamp, or desert. The great river is their only means of
growth, their only channel of progress. It is by the Nile alone that
their commerce can reach the outer markets, or European civilisation can
penetrate the inner darkness. The Soudan is joined to Egypt by the Nile,
as a diver is connected with the surface by his air-pipe. Without it
there is only suffocation. Aut Nilus, aut nihil!

The town of Khartoum, at the confluence of the Blue and White Niles, is
the point on which the trade of the south must inevitably converge. It
is the great spout through which the merchandise collected from a wide
area streams northwards to the Mediterranean shore. It marks the extreme
northern limit of the fertile Soudan. Between Khartoum and Assuan the
river flows for twelve hundred miles through deserts of surpassing
desolation. At last the wilderness recedes and the living world broadens
out again into Egypt and the Delta. It is with events that have occurred
in the intervening waste that these pages are concerned.