your angareb stands ready, the sky is your bedchamber, and the breath of the desert on your cheek is your good-night kiss. To-morrow you will begin to sweat again as you ride before breakfast. To-morrow -to-night even-there may be a dust-storm, and you will wake up with all your delicious moistness furred over by sand. But that is to-morrow.

For to-night you have thirsted and you have drunk. And to-morrow will have an evening also.

XXVI.

BY ROAD, RIVER, AND RAIL.

GRADUALLY Fort Atbara transformed itself from an Egyptian camp to a British.

Parts of the Fourth Egyptian Brigade came in from the north, but started south again almost immediately. The steamers which had taken up the blacks began to drop down to the Atbara; as soon as they tied up, new battalions were packed into them, and they thudded up-river again.

Of the four battalions of Collinson Bey's command, the 1st left in detachments on August 8, and the first instalment of the 17th had preceded them on August 7. Three companies of the 5th, with a company of camel corps, reached Berber from Suakim on August 3; they had marched the 288 miles of desert in fifteen days. This was the record for marching troops, and it is not likely that anybody but Egyptians will ever lower it. One day, after a thirty-mile stage, the halfbattalion arrived at a well and found it dry. The next was thirty miles farther. Straightway the men

got up and made their march sixty miles before they camped. They say that when, as here, native officers are in command of a desert march, they put most of their men on the baggage-camels: no doubt they do, but the great thing is that the troops get there.

The 5th joined its other half in Berber and marched in to Fort Atbara on August 6; on August 7 it was packed into steamers and sent up to Wad Habashi. On August 9 arrived the first half of the newly-raised 18th and two companies of the 17th. These had been pulling steamers and native boats up from Merawi; they too had broken a record, doing in twenty days what last year had taken twenty-six at the least and forty at the most. Among their steamers was the luckless Teb, which had run into a rock just before Dongola, and in '97 had turned turtle in the Fourth Cataract. The Sirdar had now taken the precaution of renaming her the Hafir.

The four steamers had, of course, arrived days before, and were already broken to harness. The gyassas were still behind, fighting with the prevailing south wind; between Abu Hamed and Abeidieh the trees on the bank were sunk under the flood, so that it was almost impossible to tow. One day the wind would be northerly, and that day the boats would sail forty miles; the next it would be dead contrary, and, sweating from four in the morning to ten at night, they would make five. But it had to be done, and it was done. The first arrivals of the 17th and 18th

THE CAMP BECOMES BRITISH.

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were picked up by train south of Abu Hamed; on August 11th and 13th the rest came in to find their comrades already gone. This completed the Fourth Brigade, and with its completion the whole strength of the Egyptian army was at the Atbara or forward.

So that the camp became British. The two halves of the Rifle Brigade, the first half of the Guards, and the 32nd Battery had come up on successive days; after that there was a lull. But on August 9 we had an exciting day-exciting, at least, by the standard of Fort Atbara. Late the night before had come the balance of the British artillery-the 37th Field Battery, with six howitzers, a detachment of the 16th Company, Eastern Division, Garrison Artillery, with two 40-pounders, and a detachment of the Royal Irish Fusiliers, with four Maxims.

They were getting the 40-pounders into position for shipment on the bank. All gunners are fine men, and garrison gunners are the finest men of all gunners; these were pushing and pulling their ungainly darlings in the tire-deep sand as if they were a couple of perambulators. They are old guns, these 40-pounders; their short barrels tell you that. They were in their second decade when they first came to Egypt in 1882, and, once in Khartum, they are like to spend the rest of their lives there. But for the present they were the heaviest guns with the force, and they must be nursed and cockered till they had knocked a hole or two in the Khalifa's wall. So the gunners had laid

out ropes, and now solid figures in grey flannel shirts, khaki trousers, and green-yellow putties- braces swinging from their waists, according to the ritual of cavalry and gunners and all men who tend beastswere hammering away at their pegs and establishing their capstan with which the enormous babies were to be lowered into their boats. Before they breakfasted all was in order; before they dined the guns were in the boats specially made to take them; before they supped they were well on the waterway to Khartum.

The Irish Fusiliers were picked from a fine regiment which had very hard luck in not being brought up in the Second Brigade. Set faces, heavy moustaches, necks like bulls, the score or so of men were the admiration of the whole camp. But most curiosity went naturally to the howitzers. They were hauling them out of the trucks when I got down-little tubby 5-inch creatures, in jackets like a Maxim's, on carriages like a field-gun's, carriage and gun-jacket alike painted pea-soup colour. The two trucks full of them were backed up to a little sand platform; the gunners wheeled out gun and limber and limbered up; a crowd of Egyptians seized hold, and-hallah hoh! hallah hoh!—they tugged away with them. The cry of the Egyptian when doing combined work is more like that of Brünnhilde and her sisters in the "Walküre" than any civilised noise I can remember to have heard.

The howitzers were to fire a charge of lyddite whose