The Soudan is not a definite geographical term. Bellad es Soudan is the country of the blacks, and is merely a general term like Central Africa. An Egyptian Governor-General of the Soudan rules a vast territory, extending in Gordon’s time from the Tropic of Cancer on the north to near the equator on the south, about 1,640 miles; and from the Red Sea on the east to the western boundary of Darfour, averaging about 660 miles in width. This territory includes Upper and Lower Nubia, the fertile and little known Sennaar, the wastes north of Abyssinia, the provinces of Darfour and Kordofan, and the mysterious regions of the White Nile and its affluents. Nowhere else in the explored world is there an equal area so uniform in climate and surface. The sad result of this uniformity you see in the condition of the people. In your effort to help the people, you must fight against these facts of nature. A monotony of savage tribes live in a bad climate, uniform in its badness; they inhabit a land which throughout great regions gives no variety of surface. From these conditions they have no escape. I do not say that no great improvement of people so situated is possible; but I do say that man has seldom found himself in a worse position. In the northern zone of the Soudan, down to about the twelfth degree of latitude, the climate has admitted of a feeble development of Mohammedan civilization; further south the conditions are desperate. The Arab officers of the Khedive, the Nubian slave hunters, the few European traders and travelers who have gone as far as Gondokoro, the handful of American and English officers who, in late years, have tried to carry law and light into that unhappy country—every man of them would tell you the same story of more or less rapid failure of his own vital powers, and of the terrible mortality among his comrades. We, at this distance, only hear of those who go up the Nile and come back. One has but to spend a few weeks in Khartoum to learn a long list of names of men who have gone as far as Khartoum or Fashoda, or the Sobat or Lado, only to come back, broken in health, often to die before getting to the sea. Let us now glance briefly at the physical geography of the Nile basin south of Khartoum. Below the tenth degree of latitude, the steppe country is no longer seen. Vast marshes stretch away on either hand, broken by peninsulas and islands of dry land. For 790 miles this is the character of the immediate valley of the White Nile. Between latitudes 5 and 6 the swamps end and the face of the country becomes more like our own land. From this latitude to the equator is a charmingly diversified country, with mountains, valleys, creeks, meadows, and not an extraordinary proportion of swamps. Of course, this region is more healthy than the marshes of the White Nile, but even it has a trying climate.