Imágenes de páginas
PDF
EPUB

XVI.

CAMEL-CORPS AND CAVALRY.

"CAMEL-CORPS luck," said the Bimbashi, and smiled bitterly, then swore. "O my God, if this is the big show!"

Climbing up over sand-bags on to one of the gun-platforms of Fort Atbara, we crouched in the embrasure and listened. Boom-boom-boom; very faint, but very distinct, and at half-minute intervals. We had ridden in the day before from the Sirdar's camp up the Atbara to buy more bottled fruit and, alas! more gin from the Greek shanties on the Nile beach. A convoy, on a similar errand, had been attacked by Dervishes half an hour after we had passed it, yet we heard not a shot. To-day, all this way off, we heard plainly: it must be an action indeed. Our own army, we knew, was not to move. Could it be that Mahmud had come down and was attacking us at Abadar? And we eighteen miles away at Fort Atbara, and down there in the sand-drift roadway the wobbling, grousing camels, that were to be conveyed

out at two miles an hour! We joined the Bimbashi,

chance of it.

and cursed miserably on the But no, we struggled to persuade ourselves, it couldn't be so bad as that. It must be a battalion come out to clear the road for our convoy. Or it must be the reconnaissance that was going up to the dervish zariba at Nakheila. Correspondents are not allowed to go with reconnaissances, so that if it is only that, there's no great loss after all. Anyhow it is eleven o'clock now. The baggage camels have lolloped out under the mud guard-house, through the fort-gate, through the gap in the mimosa-thorn zariba. The camel-corps escort is closing up in rear: we are off.

Half a mile ahead ride five blacks, their camels keeping perfect line. The sun flashes angrily on their rifle-barrels, but they look him steadily in the face, peering with puckered eyes over the desert below them in this land of dust and low scrub a camel's hump is almost a war balloon. Far out on their right I see a warily advancing dot, which is four more; a black dot on the rising leftward skyline, three more; out on the right flank of the baggage camels, shaving the riverside thickets, gleam white spider legs, which are a couple of camel-troopers more. They stop and examine a track; they break into a trot and disappear behind a palm clump; they reappear walking. But the main force of the two companies rides close about the swinging quadrangle of baggage camels-in front,

CAMEL-CORPS LUCK.

133

on flank, in rear. Slowly and sleepily the mass of beasts strolls on into the desert, careless what horsemen might be wheeling into line behind the ridge, or what riflemen might be ambushed in the scrub. But the scouts in front are looking at every footprint, over every skyline, behind every clump of camel-thorn.

To be out of an exciting action is camel-corps luck; this is camel-corps work. The Bimbashi missed his part in the reconnaissance to ride all night and guard the menaced convoy; he slept one hour at dawn, and now returns in the sun. He is quite fresh and active. This is his usual work; but he is not happy because this also is his usual luck. Only the Egyptian army would have found it very difficult to do without him and his desert cavalry in the past, and even now, with all the desert roads except the Bayuda behind it, finds plenty of work for the camel-corps still. And one day they say, "Take out twenty camels," and the next day, "Take out the rest." The next day, "Those twenty that weren't out yesterday can't possibly be tired"-but the Bimbashi goes out every day. The skin is scaled off his nose with sun, and his eyes are bloodshot with sand, and the hairs of his moustache have snapped off short with drought, and his hair is bleaching to white. All that is the hallmark of the Sudan.

Getting into the saddle had been like sitting down suddenly in a too hot bath; by this time you could not bear your hand upon it. Out in the desert

gleamed the steel-blue water and black reflected trees of the mirage; even in mirage there is no green in the midday sun of the Sudan. What should be green is black; all else is sun-coloured. It is torment to face the gaudy glare that stabs your eyes. If you lift them to the sky it is not very blue-I have seen far deeper in England; but it is alive all over with quivering passionate heat. Beating from above and burning from below, the sun strikes at you heavily. There is no way out of it except through the hours into evening. No sound but boot clinking on camelstirrup: you hear it through a haze. You ride along at a walk, half dead. You neither feel nor think, you hardly even know that it is hot. You just have consciousness of a heavy load hardly to be borne, pressing, pressing down on you, crushing you under the dead weight of sun.

We met the usual people - a Greek with four camels, a bare-legged boy on a donkey, a barebreasted woman under a bundle - the second and third-class passengers of the desert. of the desert. We questioned them with alternate triumph and despair, as they answered alternately after their kind. One said it was two squadrons, a battery, and a battalion fighting in our old camp at Ras Hudi; another said Mahmud had come down to Abadar and had fought the Sirdar for four hours; another said Mahmud had gone right away, and that the whole Anglo-Egyptian army had gone after him. Every story was wholly false, be

THE SCENE OF A DERVISH RAID.

135

gotten only of a wish to please; whence you perceive the advantages enjoyed by him who would collect intelligence in the Sudan.

:

Slowly the minutes crawled on; the camels crawled slower. On days like this you feel yourself growing older it seemed months since we heard the guns from the parapet; it would have hardly seemed wonderful if we had heard that the campaign had been finished while we were away. We had ridden awhile with the Bimbashi, but conversation wilted in the sun; now we had ambled ahead till even the advanced guard had dropped out of sight behind. One servant with us rode a tall fast camel; from that watch-tower he suddenly discerned cases lying open on the sand about a hundred yards off the trampled road. Anything for an incident: we rode listlessly up and looked. A couple of broken packing-cases, two tins of sardines, a tin of biscuits, half empty, a small case of empty soda-bottles with "Sirdar" stencilled on it, and a couple of empty bottles of whisky. Among them lay a cigarette-box with a needle and a reel of cotton, a few buttons, and a badge-A.S.C.such as the Army Service Corps wear on their shoulder-straps.

We were on the scene of last evening's raid. Two camels, we remembered, had been cut off and the loads. lost. We found the marks on the sand where the convoy-camels had knelt down in living zariba to wait for relief from Abadar, seven miles away. All the

« AnteriorContinuar »