he wields a power which is a strange cross between the patriarchal and the despotic. With a score or so of camel police he maintains law and order among a population which, until very recent years, were as savage and intractable as the Sioux; he holds the high justice, the middle, and the low; and he is, incidentally, a practical authority on such varied subjects as wheat-growing, cotton-raising, camel-breeding, fertilising, and irrigation. Nor would I fail to call attention to the little-known but wonderful work of a handful of British officers, who, working continuously since 1898, in those fever-ridden swamps near Lake No, have finally succeeded in removing the last block of Sudd,[2] twenty-four miles long, thus making the Nile a free, navigable waterway from Khartoum to Rejaf, in Uganda, a distance of twelve hundred miles. And these young men, remember, are but isolated examples of the thousands, in Africa, in Asia, in America, and in Oceanica, who are binding together Britain's colonial empire. [2] The name given to the dense masses of water plants which have long obstructed the upper reaches of the Nile. Its discomforts notwithstanding, the railway journey from Wady Halfa to Khartoum is filled with interest, comparing not at all unfavourably with that other remarkable desert journey by the Trans-Caspian railway from Krasnovodsk to Samarkand. For two hundred miles or more after leaving Wady Halfa we see through the blue glass of the windows nothing but endless wastes of black rocks and orange sand. Then the desert gives place to undulating sand-hills, and these in turn to clusters of dom-palms, to fields of barley, to conical acacias, and finally a fringe of palms announces the proximity of the river. We pass in turn Gebel Barka, the sacred mountain of the ancient Egyptians, and, at its base, the ruins of Napata, once the capital of an Ethiopian kingdom. A few miles south of Atbara, which is the junction of the railway to Port Sudan, on the Red Sea, we pass the so-called Island of Meroe, with its score of pyramids, beside which the majestic monuments of Egypt are but the creations of yesterday, for this region, remember, was the cradle of the Egyptian arts and sciences. In the settlements along the banks we now begin to see the typical round straw huts of Central Africa, with their pointed roofs and airy _recubas_, or porches. The peoples change with the scenery, the slender, tarbooshed Nubian giving way to the fierce-faced, shock-headed Hadendowas, that savage fighting-clan who hold the country between the Nile and the Red Sea, and they, in turn, to the Kabbabish Bedouins, those freebooters of the desert, who, perched high on their lean white racing camels, were the terror of every caravan in the days before the British came. The cultivated patches become thicker, the signs of civilisation grow increasingly frequent, the train rumbles across a long iron bridge which spans the river, and