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cane-bottomed chairs, waving their legs at the moon; and a weirdly disreputable sight it was—and then it was the next camel's turn to howl. It is a wonderful sight camels being loaded up, with buckets and tablelegs and baths and tea-kettles, hung round them as if they were Christmas-trees; but one soon has enough of it. So I left them trying to eat the hospital stores, and rode slowly out into the twilight.

Outside the zariba a heavy black snake was forging slowly along the desert road; when I came nearer it changed into a centipede; then the centipede had a kilt on, and finally it divided into the Cameron Highlanders. In front of them were the Warwicks, behind them the Maxim battery-four guns with carriages and three mules tandem, two on tripods and one mule to carry the whole gun-and the Lincolns; the whole brigade was on the march. Only seventy-five men of each regiment remained, to their indignation, as guard for the stores that the camels must make a second journey to fetch. As for the heavy baggage, that was put in the houses of the village and left to its fate. Officers started with 30-lb. kit, and men with 9-1b. Scarcity of camels perhaps justified the abandonment, but with the thermometer already 100° in the shade, it meant a lot of hardship.

After a month and a half of General Gatacre, five miles with rifle and ammunition and 9-lb. kit is very much the same to the British soldier as walking downstairs to breakfast is to you. They were just getting

BUILDING A ZARIBA.

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into their stride when the sun rose. The orange ball stepped up over the desert sky-line briskly and all in one piece, plainly intending to do a good day's work before he lay down again-and behold, we were at Kenur. Behold, also, the Sirdar's flag, white star and crescent on red, borne by one of three orderlies. Before it rode the Sirdar himself, in white apparel, fresh and cool, also like one who has his work before him and knows how it is done, and means to do it. The British halted. There was a word and a rattle, and the battalions which had been formed in one long column, four abreast, were marching off at right angles in columns of a company apiece. In no space and no time the whole brigade had tucked itself away and taken up its quarters. And hardly had the British left the road clear than in swung the second black brigade from Essillem.

These were different, many of them, from the lank soldiers of the 9th-short and stubby, plainly of other tribes; but whether the black has seventy-eight inches or sixty, every one of them is a soldier. They tramped past with their untirable bands drumming and blowing beside them; in a couple of hours they had cut their mimosa and made their zariba, and all the Dervishes in the Sudan would not be too many for them. The British, too, were out all day in the sun, at the same work, every man with his rifle on his back. It had warmed up a little more now-though 100° in the dry Sudan is not near so hot as it would be in

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England—but the British stuck to their work like men, and their zariba, a word unknown to them two months back, was every bit as straight, and thick, and prickly as the natives'.

And now we were concentrated, and only waited for them to come on. And, wonderful beyond all hope, they were coming on. The indispensable gunboats, tirelessly patrolling the river, kept the Sirdar fully informed of everything. On Shebaliya Island, forty miles south of the Atbara, they had slung an angareb aloft between a couple of spars. The Dervishes' route led within twelve hundred yards of it. There they passed everlastingly-men, women, and children ; horses, goats, and donkeys, singing and braying, flying their banners, thrumming their war-drums, booming their melancholy war-horn. And on the angareb, under an umbrella, sat a man and counted them. There was reason to hope that they were little short of 20,000.

Conformably with the traditions of the gunboat service, things did not stop at counting. On the 13th Bimbashi Sitwell and a section of the 4th Egyptians landed from the Fatha, Lieutenant Beatty's boat, and attacked a large force which had crossed to the island. There were about 1000 Dervishes and 40 Egyptians, but neither of the united services saw anything irregular in the proceedings. In face of the swarm of enemies Bimbashi Sitwell led his men into a ditch, whence they kept up a steady fire. Suddenly he felt

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a tremendous blow on his shoulder; he thought one of the soldiers had let his rifle out of hand, but turning round to swear, found himself on his back. Then he heard the voice of Lieutenant Beatty, R.N.: "It's all right,” it said; "we're doing 'em proper." "Make it so,” he replied nautically, and then, hearing a new burst of fire from the right, "You'd better order up a few more file, and turn them out of that." The next thing he knew, after the blank, was that they were turned out of that, and that 38 of them were dead, which was very nearly one each for the 40 Egyptians.

Bimbashi Sitwell had a well-furnished pair of shoulders. The bullet ran through both, but missed the spine. Four days after, he was receiving visitors at Fort Atbara in pyjamas and a cigarette. Which was a happy issue to perhaps the most staggeringly audacious of all the audacities perpetrated by the gunboats on the Nile.

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XII.

AT KENUR.

THE first thing I saw of the social life of Kenur was the Press censor shaving himself: he said that anybody might take any quarters that nobody else had taken. As he spoke my eye fell on a round tukl between the Sirdar's quarters, the Censor's, and the telegraph tent-plainly an ideal residence for correspondents. It appeared empty. True, it was not much bigger than a 'bus-driver's umbrella; but you could just get three men and a table into it. It would do very well for to-day: to-morrow we expected to fight. As it turned out, we stayed at Kenur four days, during which the tukl contracted hourly, till in the end it seemed nearly half big enough for one person. Moreover, Moreover, it turned out to be tenanted after all-by enormous bees, which had dug out the inside of the wooden framework till the whole place was one large hive. Honour and prudence alike seemed to call for an attack on them. But on reflection I pointed out that the truest courage lay in sitting quite still

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