started without breakfast, wished that I had never seen a horse or the Sudan or the light of day. At last, when it was getting on for one, the head of the column-by now a reeling ruin-turned Nileward. We shook up our horses and licked our split lips. Then we issued on to an old cotton-field-dry stalks, and between them the earth wrinkled with foot-deep cracks as close-grained as the back of your hand. The cracks were just big enough for a horse to break his leg in, and the islands between were just big enough to collapse into the cracks when a horse put his foot on them. Over this we crawled timidly till we came to a shallow yellow-ochre puddle. There we learned that this was our water, and the cracks were our camp.

The cracks proved full of scorpions, and the respective legs of your table or angareb inclined themselves at angles of 45° to the horizontal and to each other. However, we pretended we were at sea going home again, and consumed tinned spiced beef and peaches and beer-may I never want a meal more or deserve it less and slept. The feature of next day's march was a new form of vegetation a bush with leaves something like those of a canariensis, and really green, a phenomenon hitherto not met in the Sudan. And whether we marched twenty-two miles that day as was intended, or thirty-two as was asserted, or something in between as was concluded, I do not know nor then cared at eight I had called up a camel,

THE VAGARIES OF THE NILE.

223

and breakfasted on tinned spiced beef and peaches and beer.

But the important point that emerged was this: the unusually high and ever-rising Nile flood was playing the very deuce with us. The river was pushing up what they call "khors"-broad, shallow depressions which look like tributaries, only whose water runs the wrong way. These planted themselves across the track, and we had to fetch circuits round them. This second day we arrived at a second puddle, which was a second khor, and watered there. But the distressing point in the situation was that the force was to draw rations and forage every second day from depots on the bank. This was the second day, and the depot was duly on the bank; only the khor had flooded up in between. The Lancers had watered their horses, and fed them-and then they had to saddle up at four - or so, and file off round the khor three miles to get their rations. Some of the mules had not yet come in; without even off-saddling they had to follow; which made a march of nearly twelve hours on end.

You could not blame anybody for the vagaries of the Nile, but it was natural that somebody would suffer from them. Already at the first halting-place four Egyptians carried in a comrade in a blanket with a rude splint on his leg. The same day a trooper of the Lancers went down. He had been advised not to try the Sudan sun at all, but insisted on his chance of service after this first march he just got his

horse watered and fed, and then dropped insensible with sunstroke. He was but just conscious next morning. Four Egyptian gunners carried him on an upturned angareb to Kitiab, the second halting-place. Here he was left with others. Next day and the next there were others.

The horses, too, suffered. Those of the squadron which came up first, and the horses from Darmali and Essillem, stood the marching almost perfectly. Those which had started to tramp the morning after the rail-river journey went down with fever in the feet. Twelve days' standing had sent all the blood to their feet; the red-hot sand did the rest.

We left a dozen on the shore at Kitiab to be picked up by a passing boat, if so it might befall. The third day we marched on through a park-like country, thick with tall, spreading, almost green mimosa-trees; in one place, where a khor lapped up, if sand were grass you might almost have cried "The Serpentine." We camped at a ruined village on a sandhill-name unknown and uncared-and for the first time saw the Nile, which we were supposed to be drinking. He was lying at the far end of a three-mile tangle of bush. The fourth day, guided by the brown-faced cliffs on his farther bank, we came down on the pleasantest camp I had yet seen on Nile or AtbaraMagawieh. There was no village but mud ruins; but there were clusters and groves of real palms-datepalms with yellow and scarlet clusters of ripe fruit.

THE RETURN OF THE NATIVE.

225

We sat down on the very lip of the river, which came up flush with the grass bank, like a full tide. And there, on August 20, we halted to rest the horses. Half-a-dozen were sent down with fever in the feet; also a few soldiers, some bad, some not so bad as they said. The rest of us were very hard and sound by now, with the skin well peeled off our noses.

By now we had marched about halfway to Wad Habashi. And of population we had seen hardly a soul. Ruined villages we passed in plenty-so far back from the river that they must have lived from wells. Now, since Mahmud killed out the Jaalin, they did not live at all. We found evidences of some poor prosperity-the dry runnels of old irrigation, the little chequers of old fields, old, round, mud granaries, old crackling zaribas, old houses rocking on their mud foundations, old bones white in the sun. All the rest was killed out by the despot we were marching to try to kill. The fighting force of the Jaalin was ahead of us on the same errand, and with two more motives -revenge and loot. Behind us straggled the returning families-one man with a spear, a bevy of plumbloom girls and old women and infants on donkeys, a goat or two for sole sustenance. They were returning; their ruins were their own again.

Р

226

XXIX.

METEMMEH.

"

GOOM!" The hideous cry broke on to the night, and jarred on the white stars. "Mohammed! Ali! Hassan! Goom, goom!" I sat up on my angareb and groaned. Do not be frightened; "goom" is not the cry of a beast of prey. It is worse; it is the Arabic for "Wake," and it was three in the morning. We were moving out of our pleasant palm - shade at Magawieh on August 21, and taking the road south again.

The clumsy column formed up after its clumsy wont, and threaded sleepily desertward through the mimosa-thorns. After a few minutes we came, to our wonder, on to a broad flat road embanked at each side. It could hardly have been built by scorpions, and there were no other visible inhabitants. Then, at a corner, we came to a sign-post-a sign-post, by all that's astounding with "To Metemmeh" inscribed there

We learned afterwards that the fertile-minded Hickman Bey, finding himself and his battalion