CHAPTER XVII

The old sheik, Hatim, faithfully kept the promise he had made to the Greek, and carefully protected the children. The road to the upper White Nile was a difficult one. They rode through Getena, El-Dueim, and Kawa; then they passed Abba, a wooded island in the Nile, on which, before the Mahdi’s war, a Dervish had lived in a hollow tree the life of a hermit. The caravan had to go around wide tracts of land covered with papyrus and swamps called “Suddis,” from which the wind blew a stench caused by rotted and decaying…