The difficulties and dangers of tearing a passage through the dense masses of floating vegetation which periodically obstruct the Nile, making navigation impossible, are well described in an article which appears in the August number of Pearson’s Magazine. A free waterway has now been opened up the Nile as far as Uganda. In all fourteen blocks of the sudd, as the drifting marshes are called, have been removed, the total length of the river cleared being 83 miles. The actual work was done by some 750 Soudanese prisoners under the direct orders of two young officers of the British Royal Navy. The following is an extract from a journal kept by one of them:— Now, as to how we do it. On arriving at a block we tie up the steamer, and set everything on fire, then cut down all the dead papyrus which is on the sudd, until it soon looks like a very rough field. Then this field is dug into small sections four or five yards square; the trenches are dug to about two feet under water, the sudd itself being one, two, or three feet above water, and from six to ten underneath. Next we put pieces of wood round our section (cut up telegraph poles), fix a wire hawser round the section, shoved well down in the trenches and behind the posts, and bring the two ends on the steamer. The steamer then backs astern, and eventually pulls out the section, which floats away down stream. The wire is got on board again, the poles are recovered, and the steamer proceeds for another section. The force and jerk which the steamer brings on the wire severs the roots of the section underneath from the others—or at least sometimes does! That’s the idea.