xcellent passage for Gordon's small steamboat. But
the Nile can also place an insurmountable obstacle in the traveller's
way. After the rainy season the White Nile overflows its banks, forming
an inextricable labyrinth of side branches, lakes, and marshes. The
country lies under water for miles around. The waterway between
impenetrable beds of reeds and papyrus is often as narrow as a lane. The
roots of large plants are loosened from the mud at the bottom, and are
compacted with stems and mud into large sheets which are driven
northwards by the rushing water. They are caught fast in small openings
and sudden bends, and other islets of vegetation are piled up against
them. Thus the river course is blocked, and above these natural dams the
water forms lakes. Such banks of drifting or arrested and decaying
vegetation are called _sudd_, and the more it rains the greater are the
quantities that come down. At length the _sudd_ becomes soft and yields
to the pressure of the water, and then the Nile is navigable again.

Gordon's small steamer glides gently up the river. He advances deeper
and deeper into a world unknown to him, and around him seethes tropical
Africa. On the banks papyrus stems wave their plumes above the reeds. It
was from the pith of papyrus stems that the old Egyptians made a kind of
paper on which they wrote their chronicles. Here and there swarthy
natives are seen between the reed beds, and sometimes noisy troops of
wandering monkeys gaze at the boat. The hippopotami look like floating
islands, but show themselves only at night, wallowing in the shallow
water. A little beyond the luxuriant vegetation of the banks extends the
boundless grassland with its abundant animal life and thin scattered
clumps of trees.

After a journey of four days the steamer glided past an island. There
dwelt in a grotto a dervish or mendicant monk named Mohamed Ahmed, who
ten years later was to be Gordon's murderer.

In the middle of April Gordon and his companions were in Gondokoro, a
small place which now stands on the boundary between the Sudan and
British East Africa, and here he took charge of his Equatorial Province.
He forced the Egyptian soldiers, who garrisoned this and one or two
other posts on the Nile and robbed on their own account, to plough and
plant; he arrested all slave-hunters within reach and freed the slaves;
he succoured the poor, protected the helpless, and sent durra to the
hungry.

The heat was excessi