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XIV.

THE RAID ON SHENDI..

I HAD stepped out in the morning to pick fruit from the sanduk for breakfast. Below me, in the shallow river, a damson-skinned black was bathing and washing his white Friday clothes and whistling The British Grenadiers." The sun was just up; but in the Sudan he begins to blister things the moment he is over the horizon. The sanduk lay on the south side of the north wall of our zariba. Greengages were glittering in the young sunshine; but to pull up misapprehension, I may as well say at once that sanduk is the Arabic for provision-case, and that our greengages glittered through glass bottles. It may be that you were never much attracted by bottled fruits. But they taste of fruit a good deal more than tinned ones; and when your midday is six hours of solid 110 in the shade, you will find bottled fruits one of the things least impossible to eat that you are likely to get.

Therewith entered the Mess-President's head camel

A NEW USE FOR ELLIMAN.

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man. He was a Jaali by tribe; his name meant "Powerful in the Faith"; and in this wilderness I liked to think that if he were not black, and had no moustache, and no razor-cut tribal marks on his cheeks, his tilted nose and smiling teeth, and erect, sprightly carriage would make him a rather pretty-ugly French girl. He approached his lord's bed before the tent door and pattered Arabic faster than I can keep up with. But the sum of his tale was this: that the raid on Shendi had been a great success, many Dervishes were slain, and many taken, with many women and children; that his fellow-Jaalin had done best part of the execution, and that the 15th Battalion was already back again at Fort Atbara.

Then let us go to Fort Atbara, said we, and hear all about it. We are going mouldy for want of exercise -and, to be quite open with you, the liquor famine here is getting grave. Last night the boy came up with a couple of bottles: "Only two wine more,” said he, and mournfully displayed one Scrubbs's Cloudy Ammoniatry it in your bath, but not in your drinking-cup-and one Elliman's Embrocation. So saddle up; it is 1000 to 5 against a fight here to-day, and it is better to sweat a-horseback in the desert oven-blast than fry in sand and camp-smells here.

So the Mess-President and I picked our way over the spongy ground outside camp where the water lies in flood time, and then swung out, quarter of an hour canter and ten minutes walk, over the hard sand and

gravel of the desert. The way from Fort Atbara was trodden already into a road as broad as Berber High Street, and almost as populous-now a white-underclothed Jaali scallywag with a Remington and a donkey, now a lolloping convoy of camels, now a couple of Greeks with stores. For the Jew, as we know him, is a child for commercial enterprise alongside the Sudan Greek. A Greek had his ovens going on Ferkee field before the last shot was fired; the moment the Suakim road was opened the Greek's camels were on it. The few English merchants here were hard and enterprising, and they had good stuff— only just when you wanted it, it was usually just a day's journey away. The Greek gets his stuff up everywhere it is often inferior stuff, and he caravans it with a double-barrelled rifle on his shoulder and visions of Dervishes behind every mimosa bush; but he gets it up. He charges high for it, but he deserves every piastre he gets.

At Fort Atbara there stood already a small bazaar of tukls, and a pink shirt-sleeved, black-stubblechinned Greek in each among his wares. There we laid in every known liquor except claret and beer; there we even got six dozen Pilsener-bottles of sodawater of such are the privations of the Sudan. Most of the Greeks seemed to confine their energies to sardines, many degrees over proof. But one had planted a little salad-garden; another knew where he could get tomatoes; a third specialised in scented

soap and stationery. Remember, we were twelve hundred miles from the nearest place where people buy such things in shops; remember, too, that not an inch of Government truck or steamer could be spared for private dealers; and then you will realise what a Nansen of retail trade is the Sudan Greek.

But a correspondent cannot live by soda-water and tabasco sauce alone: let us try to acquire some information. In the commanderia-that stable house of mud, six-roomed and lofty roofed, the stateliest mansion of the Sudan-sits Hickman Bey, who swept out Shendi. In the English army it would be almost a scandal that an officer of his service should go anywhere or do anything. The Egyptian army is an army of young men, with the red-hot dash of a boy tempered by responsibility into the fine steel of a man at his best for both plan and deed.

But about the raid. To listen to any one of the men who conducted it you would think that he had been a passenger, and that all the others had done all the work that is their way. The three gunboats with their naval officers-now you observe the full significance of the fact that the British Navy's command of the sea runs up to the Sixth Cataract-with the 15th Battalion, guns, and 150 friendly Jaalin, left Fort Atbara on March 24. They were to have surprised Shendi in the morning of the 26th; but luck was bad, though it turned out not to matter much. One of the boats went aground, as boats will

on a daily falling Nile. It took some hours to get her off, and then, as it was too late for Saturday morning, and an afternoon attack would leave no light for pursuit, it was decided to make it Sunday. So the boats went slow, stopping here and there to wood up on the depeopled banks; but at one place it fell out that the landing-party came on three Dervishes. One of them got away with his skin and the alarm. When he came to Shendi the garrison-700 men with many women and children were tom-tomming a fantasia on account of an alleged victory whereof Mahmud had advertised them. The fantasia broke up hurriedly, and all the best quality women were sent away on camels to Omdurman. That meant, of course, the Baggara Arab women. The women of the black riflemen and spearmen were left to shift.

At ten on Sunday morning Colonel Hickman and his raiders duly appeared and landed. They found the enemy drawn up between the bank and rising ground; there were four forts-one sunken, three circular earth walls-but Mahmud took away the guns with him. The Fifteenth formed column of fours and marched placidly in front of the enemy, taking not the least notice of their fire-which indeed hurt nobody— till it outflanked their left. The two forces were then more or less like a couple of L's lying on their backs, one inside the other. The dervish L was the inside one-the stem of it fighting men and the foot scally