324 Egypt
spaces and sparsely populated plains of Darfur, Kor-
dofan, and Sennar, traversed by the valleys of the White
and Blue Nile. Here we have a mixture of negroid races
and of native tribes like the Baggara, with a primitive
Arabic civilisation and professing Islam. North of
Khartum, where deserts and dried pastures extend
across the Nile to the Dead Sea, there are Arab tribes
like the Kabadish and others which are arabised like the
Hadendowa and Bisharin, while the settled population
along the valley is mixed Nubian and negroid. We have,
in fact, in the Sudan at least three regions quite different
in character, of which only the northernmost and least
potentially important has any resemblance to Egypt
itself. To quote a good authority on the Sudan (Mr. E.
Grove, The Times, August 28, 1924) : "A few hun-
dred miles south of Khartum you are in a country as
different from Egypt as Egypt is from England, The
Arabic speaking Mahomedan of the Nile valley gives
place to a native black savage who does not know what
Mahomedanism is and whose languages differ from
Arabic as completely as Arabic differs from English.3'
Nor during the generation of effective Egyptian occupa-
tion of the Northern Sudan did Egypt ever get any hold
over the province as a whole. To quote the same
authority : *c Not one soul in my district knew the differ-
ence between an Englishman and an Egyptian. We were
all just 'red men/ Not only had they never heard of
England, but they had never heard of Egypt.*' As to
the success of Egyptian occupation in developing the
Sudan and the possibility that they could continue the
civilisation created by the British out of the devastation
of the Mahdist revolt against Egypt, there can be no
two opinions. To quote Mr. Grove again: "The
Egyptian does not regard the primitive black as a human