AN ENGINEERING FEAT.

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failed without them; but without the railway there could never have been any campaign at all. The battle of the Atbara was won in the workshops of Wady Halfa.

Everybody knew that a railway from Halfa across the desert to Abu Hamed was an impossibility-until the Sirdar turned it into a fact. It was characteristic of the Sirdar's daring—daring based on complete knowledge and just confidence in himself and his instruments; but to the uninformed it seems mad recklessness-that he actually launched his rails and sleepers into the waterless desert, while the other end of the line was still held by the enemy. Water was bored for, and, at the third attempt, found, which lightened the task; but the engineers are convinced that, water or no water, the Sirdar's ingenuity and determination would have carried the enterprise through. Long before the line was due to arrive Abu Hamed had fallen before the end of 1897 the line touched the Nile again at that point, 234 miles from Halfa, and the journey to Berber took a day instead of weeks.

:

There was no pause at Abu Hamed; work was begun immediately on the 149-mile stretch to the Atbara. At the beginning of the year, when the rumours of Mahmud's advance began to harden into credibility and the British regiments were started up the river, rail-head was some twenty miles south of Abu Hamed. The object, of course, was to push it on south of the series of rapids ending at Geneineteh,

some twenty-odd miles short of Berber, which are called the Fifth Cataract. On the falling river camel portage had to be used round the broken water, which was a serious difficulty in the way of the transport. A second object in hurrying on the work was to get the sections of the three new gunboats to the same point south of the cataract, where they could be put together ready for the final advance.

It was a heavy strain, for the railway had not only to carry up supplies and stores: it had also to carry the materials for its own extension. There is no wood for sleepers between Abu Hamed and the Atbara, much less any possibility of providing rails. So that all day long you heard the wailing lilt, without which no Arab can work in time; all day at intervals the long material train pulled out from the beach-siding piled up with rails and sleepers, paused awhile at the bank of sand which is the platform of the northern terminus, and in due time puffed off southward till it was lost among the desert sandhills.

It was a heavy handicap that an infant railway should be asked for double work, but that was only the beginning of the difficulty. The S.M.R., like every thing else in Egypt, must be worked on the cheap. There is no trouble about the labour-the Railway Battalions supply that. The Railway Battalions are raised by conscription, only instead of fighting with Martini and bayonet the conscripts fight with shovel

THE RAILWAY BATTALIONS.

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and pick. I have heard it called the Corvée in another form so, if you like, it is. But it is no more Corvée than the work of sappers in any European army. The fellah has to shovel for his country instead of fighting for it, and he would much rather. It is war service which happens to retain a permanent value when war is over; so much the better for everybody.

But if navvy labour is abundant and cheap and efficient, everything else is scarce and cheap and nasty. English firemen and drivers are hard to get, and Italian mechanics are largely employed-so much so, that the Director of Railways has found it worth while to spare a café for them out of his cramped elbow-room. As for native mechanics, there are branches of work in which they are hopeless. fitters they are a direct temptation to suicide, for the Arab mind can never be brought to see that a tenth of an inch more or less can possibly matter to anybody. "Malesh," he says, "it doesn't matter; shove it in." And then the engine breaks down.

As

As for engines and rolling-stock the S.M.R. must make the best of what it can get. Half-a-dozen new engines of English breed there were when I got to Halfa-fine, glossy, upstanding, clean-limbed, powerful creatures; and it was a joy to watch the marvelling black sentry looking up to one of them in adoration and then warily round lest anybody should seek to steal it. There were others ordered, but-miracle of

national lunacy!—the engineering strike intervened, and the orders had to go to Baldwin's of Philadelphia. For the rest the staff had to mend up anything they found about. Old engines from Ismail's abortive railway, old engines from Natal, from the Cape, broken and derelict, had to be patched up with any kind of possible fittings retrieved and adapted from the scrapheap. Odd parts were picked up in the sand and fitted into their places again: if they were useless they were promptly turned into something else and made useful. There are a couple of Ismail's boilers in use now which were found lying miles away in the desert and rolled in by lever and hand. In the engine-shed you see rusty embryos of engines that are being tinkered together with bits of rubbish collected from everywhere. And still they move.

Who moves them? It is part of the Sirdar's luck -that luck which goes with genius-that he always gets the best conceivable subordinates. Conceive a blend of French audacity of imagination, American ingenuity, and British doggedness in execution, and you will have the ideal qualities for such a work. The Director of Railways, Bimbashi Girouard, is a Canadian, presumably of French derivation. In early life he built a section of the Canadian Pacific. He came out to Egypt for the Dongola campaign-one of three subalterns specially chosen from the Railway Department of the Royal Engineers. The Sudan

killed the other two out of hand, but Bimbashi

A CROWNING WONDER.

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Girouard goes on 'building and running his railways. The Dongola line runs as far as Kerma, above the Third Cataract. The Desert Line must wait at the Atbara for a bridge before it can be extended to Khartum. But already here is something over five hundred miles of rail laid in a savage desert-a record to make the reputation of any engineer in the world, standing to the credit of a subaltern of sappers. The Egyptian army is a triumph of youth on every side, but in none is it more signal than in the case of the Director of Railways. He never loses his head nor forgets his own mind: he is credited with being the one man in the Egyptian army who is unaffectedly unafraid of the Sirdar.

Having finished the S.M.R. to the Atbara, Bimbashi Girouard accepted the post of Director-General of all the Egyptian railways. There will be plenty of scope for him in the post, and it will not be wasted.

just reflect again on this crowning wonder of British Egypta subaltern with all but Cabinet rank and £2000 a-year!

When the time came to go up by the desert line an engine, two trucks, and a fatigue-party called at the door for our baggage: that is the advantage of a railway-traffic managed by subalterns. We had the luck to get berths in the big saloon. It is built on the Indian plan-four beds in one compartment, eight in the other, plenty of room on the floor, and shutters everywhere to keep out the sand. The train looked as if the other