March from Wady Abid to Sayal (ten miles) Omdurman reconnoitred and forts silenced Battle and capture of Omdurman . Funeral of Gordon Sirdar starts for Fashoda Battle of Gedaref. Sirdar returns from Fashoda. 11, 18, 11 July (early) Aug. 3-17, 11 11 13, 18, 28, 29, WITH KITCHENER TO KHARTUM. I. HALFA TELLS ITS STORY. To walk round Wady Halfa is to read the whole romance of the Sudan. This is the look-out whence Egypt has strained her vision up-Nile to the vast, silent, torrid, murderous desert land, which has been in turn her neighbour, her victim, all but her undoing, and is now to be her triumph again. On us English, too, the Sudan has played its fatal witchery, and half the tale of Halfa is our own as well as Egypt's. its buildings and up and down its sandy, windy streets we may trace all the stages of the first conquest, the loss, the bitter failures to recover, the slow recommencement, the presage of final victory. On You can get the whole tale into a walk of ten minutes. First look at that big white building it is A the Egyptian military hospital, and one of the largest, solidest structures of Halfa. In shape and style, you will notice, it is not unlike a railway-station-and that is just what it was meant to be. That was the northern terminus of Ismail Pasha's great railway to Khartum, which was to have run up-river to Dongola and Debbeh, and thence across the Bayuda, by Jakdul and Abu Klea to Metemmeh. The scheme fell short, like all Ismail's grandiose ambitions; Gordon stopped it, and paid for his unforesight with his life. The railway never reached the Third Cataract. The upper part of it was torn to pieces by the Dervishes, who chopped the sleepers into firewood, and twisted the telegraph-wires to spear-heads; the part nearer Halfa lay half-derelict for many years, till it was aroused at length to play its part in the later act of the tragedy of the Sudan. Now, twenty yards along the line-in this central part of Halfa every street is also a railway-you see a battered, broken-winded engine. It was here in 1884. That is one of the properties of the second act -the nerveless efforts to hold the Sudan when the Mahdi began to rip it loose. For in the year 1881, before we came to Egypt at all, there had arisen a religious teacher, a native of Dongola, named Mohammed Ahmed. The Sudan is the home of fanaticism: it has always been called "the Land of the Dervishes," and no rising saint was more ascetic than the young Dongolawi. He was a disciple of a holy man named |