Everywhere along the banks of the Nile there is fertile country, but in the Sudan territories of Kordofan, Sennar, and other provinces, are seemingly boundless tracts of desert, broken here and there by rocky hills or “gebels,” which perhaps attain a height of three or four hundred feet. In such places large dog-faced baboons abound, hyenas shelter in the caves, and near to the wells, usually found among the rocks, are native encampments, where dwell Arabs, Taishi, and Baggara people, who fought so determinedly against the English in 1885. Now, however, they are quite friendly, and the traveller may be invited into the “zereba,” an enclosure containing a number of circular huts with pointed roofs, and here refreshment of coffee and milk is provided. Thin miserable dogs bark defiance at the stranger, who keeps them at bay with his whip of rhinoceros hide. Little naked children play about in much the same way as white youngsters amuse themselves, but they are more delighted than their white cousins would be by the gift of a wire bracelet or a string of beads. Outside the huts kneeling women crush the grain--“dhurra”--on slabs of stone; and what an enormous pile of this crushed grain a Sudanese will eat! Seldom does he enjoy the luxury of meat. A whitish, muddy-looking liquid may be offered to the visitor; this he had better avoid, for it is native beer, made by allowing soaked “dhurra” to stand in the sunshine for several days. If the village population has reached two or three thousand, there are sure to be a few Arab merchants who have brought their calico, dried dates, and other wares all the way from Khartoum or Wad Medani. There they sit by the goods, which are laid out on the ground, possibly reading a chapter from the “Koran” or Mohammedan Bible, while a small group of natives gather round and decide how to spend the money which they have only recently learned to use, instead of bartering, that is, changing one article for another. In many parts of the Sudan natives are employed on irrigation works or railways, where the workmen are paid with Egyptian coins. Even now a native prefers to have a lot of little coins, and would at any time receive several small coins rather than one silver piece. Uganda and British East Africa can show enormous tracts of park land, where European enterprise is engaged in cattle rearing, and native tribes such as the Masai rely on their flocks and herds for a living. In no part of the world, not even in the Amazon valley, are the forests more dense than those of Uganda, where the traveller finds Bantu tribes existing much as they have done for thousands of years. When reading of railways connecting Port Sudan, on the Red Sea, with Khartoum, or of a line from Nairobi in British East Africa to Port Florence on Victoria Nyanza thence to the great port of Mombasa, one is apt to think that these East African Protectorates must be very advanced in civilisation, but this is not the case.