But first we had to tunnel through the filthiest seventeen hours in Egypt. The servants had spread our blankets on the bare, hard leather seats of the boxes that Egyptian railways call sleeping-cars; a faint grateful air began to glide in through the windows. And then came in the dust. Without haste -had it not seventeen hours before it ?-it streamed through every chink in a thick coffee-coloured cloud. It piled itself steadily over the seats and the floor, the bags and bundles and cases; it built up walls of mud round the soda-water, and richly larded the half-cold chicken for the morrow's lunch. We choked ourselves to sleep; in the morning we choked no longer, the lungs having reconciled themselves to breathe powdered Egypt. Our faces were layered with coffee-colour, thicker than the powder on the latest fashionable lady's nose. Hair and moustaches, eyebrows and eyelashes, and every corner of sun-puckered eyes, were lost and levelled in rich friable soil. And from the caked, sun-riven fields of thirsty Egypt fresh clouds rose and rolled and settled, till in all the train you saw, smelt, touched, tasted nothing but dust.

At Luxor came the first novelty. When I came down the practicable railway stopped short there: now a narrow-gauge railway ran through to Assuan. It is not quite comprehensible why the gauge should have been broken,-perhaps to make sure that the line should be kept exclusively military. It can easily be altered afterwards to the Egyptian gauge;

THE PRICE OF TAMING THE SUDAN.

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meanwhile the journey is done by train in twelve hours against the post-boat's thirty-six.

Assuan was the same as ever.

Shellal, at the head

of the cataract, the great forwarding station for the South, was the same, only much more so. The high bank was one solid rampart of ammunition and beef, biscuit and barley; it clanged and tinkled all night through with parts of steamers and sections of barges. Stern-wheelers came down from the South, turned about, took in fuel, hooked on four barges alongside, and thudded off up-river again. No hurry; no rest. And here was the same Commandant as when I came up before. He had had one day in Cairo; his hair was two shades greyer; he was still being reviled by everybody who did not have everything he wanted sent through at five seconds' notice; he was still drawing unmercifully on body and brain, and ripping good years out of his life to help to conquer the Sudan. Victory over dervishes may be won in an hour, may be cheap; victory over the man-eating Sudan-the victory of the railway, the steamer, the river-means months and years of toil and so much of his life lost, to every man that helps to win it.

The steamer tinkered at her fourteen-year-old boiler for twenty hours, and then trudged off towards Halfa. She did the 200 odd miles in 77 hours, so that it would have been almost as quick to have gone by road in a wheelbarrow. But then the nuggars alongside were heavy with many sacks of barley, to be

turned later into cavalry chargers. Moreover, on the second morning, rounding a bend, we suddenly saw a line drawn diagonally across the river. All the water below the line was green; all above it was brown. And the brown pressed slowly, thickly forward, driving the green before it. This was the Nile-flood,-the rich Abyssinian mud that comes down Blue Nile and Atbara. When this should have floated down below the cataract, Egypt would have water again, air again, bread again, life again. And the Sudan would have gunboats and barges of cartridges and gyassas of food and fodder, and the Sirdar thundering at the gates of Khartum.

Next windy, green-treed Halfa-only this time it was less windy than last, and the trees, though still the greenest on the Nile, were not so green. Last time there had been melons growing on the sandy eyot opposite the commanderia, and the eyot had grown higher daily; this time it was all dry sand and no melons,-only it grew daily smaller in the lapping water. But spring or summer, Halfa's business is the same—the railway and the recruits. That line was finished now up to the Atbara, and the foreshore was clear of rails and sleepers. But instead they were forcing through stores and supplies, choking the trucks to the throat with them. The glut had only begun when the line reached its terminus; it would be over before the new white brigade came through. Everything in the Sirdar's Expedition has

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its own time-first material, then transport, then troops; and woe unto him who is behind his time.

The platform was black and brown, blue and white with a great crowd of natives. For drawn up in line opposite the waiting trucks were rigid squads of black figures in the familiar brown jersey and blue putties, and on the tarbushes the badges, green, black, red, yellow, blue, and white, of each of the six Sudanese battalions. Thin-shanked Shillúks and Dinkas from the White Nile, stubby Beni-Helba from Darfur and the West, they were just the figures and huddled savage-smiling faces that we had last seen at Berber. Only the last time we had seen those particular blacks they were shooting at us. Every one had begun life as a dervish, and had been taken prisoner at or after the Atbara. Now, not four months after, here they were, erect and soldierly, with at least the rudiments of shooting, on their way to fight their former masters, and very glad to do it. They knew when they were well off. Before they were slaves, halfclothed, half-fed, half-armed, good to lose their women at Shendi, and to stay in the trenches of Nakheila when the Baggara ran away. Now they are free soldiers, well paid, well clothed, well fed, with weapons they can trust and officers who charge ahead and would rather die than leave them. Their women-who, after the Egyptian army-are

all, only preceded them into

as safe from recapture at Halfa as you are in the Strand. No wonder the blacks grinned merrily as

M

they bundled up on to the trucks, and the women lu-lu-lued them off with the head-stabbing shrillness of certain victory.

The first time I travelled on the S.M.R. I enjoyed a berth in the large saloons; the second time in one of the small saloons; this time it was a truck. But the truck, after all, was the most comfortable of the three. It was a long double-bogie, with a plank roof, and canvas curtains that you could let down when the sun came in, and eight angarebs screwed to the floor. Therein six men piled their smaller baggage, and set up their tables, and ate and drank and slept and yawned forty-eight hours to the Atbara. Of all the three months' changes in the Sudan, here were the most stupefying. Abeidieh, where the new gunboats had been put together, had grown from a hut and two tents to a railway station and triangle and wateringplant and engine - shed, and rows of seemly mudbarracks, soon to be hospital. But the Atbara was even more utterly transformed. I had left it a fortified camp; I found it a kind of Nine Elms. Lewis Bey's house, then the pride of the Sudan, now cowered in the middle of a huge mud-walled station-yard. Boxes and barrels and bags climbed up and overshadowed and choked it. Ammunition and stores, food and fodder-the journey had been a crescendo of them, but this was the fortissimo. You wandered about among the streets of piles that towered overhead, and lost yourself in munitions of war. Along