GREAT FLOATING ISLAND

Hokitika Guardian, 9 July 1921, Page 3

GREAT FLOATING ISLAND

THE SUDD OF THE NILE. BARRIERS OF VEGETATION. Tlie heavy mins in the region of the great lakes of Africa which occur about April, carry down into the White Nile —the part south of Khartoum—great floating masses of water weeds and plants. These are known as the sudd, and a very amazing work of nature it is. The country along the banks of the Upper Nile is an immense swamp in which grow vast masses of papyrus reed, the plant from which the earliest pajier was made. Often the roods grow fifteen or twenty feet high. During the storms of wind and rain, very frequent at this season, large

quantities of papyrus tire torn up by the roots and sent floating down the river with quantities of earth bound together bv the roots. As it travels it collects other plants and is reinforced by tree trunks pmd branches until enormous floating islands are lormed, .sometimes 50 miles long, sis wide as the river, and 20ft deep.

The How of the river is impeded, and the water spreads out on either side until what was once a river becomes little* more than a moving swamp. There is no remedy but to cut up the sudd and drag it out ot the river, and this is what is now done regularly every year under British direction. The floating wood is first set alight, and when all that will burn lias been fired, flit* remainder is cut up into blocks about 10ft square and dragged out on to the hanks with wire hawsers and chains.

A factory at Khartoum dries the weed, reduces it to a powder, and then presses it into hricklets to he used as fuel by the Nile steamers. Men ol science arc also busily at work trying to find some other use for the sudd. wn ly hy the most strenuous exertions can tlic Upper Nile he kept clear lor navigation.

The sudd lias been known for at least 2000 vears. Nero sent two officers to explore the Nile, and they were stopped by this barrier of vegetation, and Intel explorers tell the same story. The pressure of the water makes the mass so solid that men can walk on it, and even elephants have been soon to cross the river oil the sudd.

Sir Samuel Baker, who in his journeys up the Nile on behalf of the Egyptian Government bail to set hundreds of men to work cutting passages through the sudd for his steamers, tells how on one occasion the men suddenly came upon something struggling beneath their feet. When they had cutaway some of the weeds, to their alarm they found that the moving object was a hie crocodile imprisoned in the sudcl.

Even with hundreds of workers armed with sharp hUMiooks and sabres oi*l. 3(10 yards of sudd could be cut through in a day, and there were fifty miles in one continuous stretch. It was at Samuel Baker’s suggestion that the Egyptian Government began to clear the Upper Nile, but the advent of the Malidi stopped it for some years. Since 1900, however, the sudd is attacked regularly every year. Sudd comes from an Arabic word, meaning obstacle or barrier,