Illustration: A gift from Ali Dinar, Sultan of Darfur, to the Sirdar of the Sudan. (The Sultan of Darfur is a semi-independent and powerful native ruler of the Southwestern Sudan.) STRANGE PEOPLE FROM INNERMOST AFRICA.] I was told so repeatedly by people in other and more favoured parts of Africa that the Sudan was nothing but a waste of sun-scorched sand, that I went there as much to see if the description were a true one as for any other reason. You don't have to search for romance in the Sudan; it's there waiting for you when you arrive. It met me on the station platform at Wady Halfa, which is the first town across the Sudanese frontier, in the form of a fair-haired, moon-faced, khaki-clad guard on the Khartoum express, who spurned the tip I proffered him to secure a compartment to myself as insolently as the poor but virtuous heroine of the melodrama spurns the villain's gold. He drew back as though the silver I offered him were a rattlesnake in working order and his face flushed a dull brick-red; then, bowing stiffly from the waist, as a Prussian officer does when he is introduced, he turned on his heel and strode away. “I say, you got the wrong one that time, old chap,” remarked an Englishman who had witnessed the little incident and who, judging from his pith helmet and riding-breeches, was of the country. “You probably didn't know that you were offering a tip to a former captain in his German Majesty's _garde du corps_?” I remarked that a month before a former general of division of the Bey of Tunis had accepted with marked gratitude a tip not half so large for showing me through the Palace of the Bardo. “Well, this Johnnie won't,” was the reply. “He may not have much money, but he's loaded to the gunwales with pride. The story of his career sounds as if it had served as a model for one of Ouida's novels. Refused to marry the girl his parents had picked out for him, so his father cut off his allowance and left him to shift for himself. He sent in his papers, went to Algeria, and enlisted—of all fool things!—in that regiment of earth's hard cases called the Foreign Legion. It didn't take him long to get all he wanted of that kind of soldiering, so one day, when he was sent down to Oran in charge of a prisoner, he swam out to a British steamer lying in the harbour, worked his passage to Alexandria, enlisted in a British cavalry regiment, took part in Kitchener's campaign against the Khalifa, was wounded in the shindy at Omdurman, and retired on a pension. Now he wears a guard's uniform and carries a green flag and walks up and down the platform shouting 'All aboard for Khartoum!' And at home he would have a coronet on his visiting-cards and spend his afternoons swaggering along Unter den Linden. Extraordinary what a man will do if he has to, isn't it? But you'll find lots more of the same kind in the Sudan. It's no place for idlers down here; every one works or gets out.”