hot tea. The thirst thinks its conquest assured; it takes the hot tea for a signal of surrender, and hurls the first cup arrogantly out again through your skin. You fire in the second cup-and you find that you have gained some ground. It may be that tea is nearer the temperature of your body than a merely tepid drink; it may be some divine virtue in the herb; but you feel the second cup of tea settle within you. You feel yourself a degree less torrid, a shade more substantial.

If you are wise you will rest content for the moment with this advantage. Order your pony and gallop an hour in the desert. You will sweat, of course; you need not expect to escape that at any time. But the sweat cools off you, and you ride in with a fresh skin. Take your tub in your tent: the Nile cools faster than the land, and oh the deliciousness of the cold water licking round you!

Now comes the sweet revenge for all the torments of the day. It is quite dark by now, unless the moon be up, leaning to you out of a tender blue immensity, silver, caressing, cool. Or else the sprightly candles beckon from your dinner-table, spread outside the tent, a halo of light and white in the blackness, alert, inviting, cool. You, too, by now are clean and cool. You quite forget whether the day was more than warm

or no.

But you remember the thirst. You are cool, but within you are still dry, very dry and shrunken. Take

THE MOMENT OF THE DAY.

203

a long mug and think well what you will have poured into it; for this is the moment of the day, the moment that pays for the Sudan. You are very thirsty, and you are about to slake your thirst. Let it be alcoholic, for you have exuded much life in the day; let it above all be long. Whisky-and-soda is a friend that never fails you, but better still something tonic. Gin and soda? Gin and lime-juice and soda? Gin and bitters and lime-juice and soda? or else that triumphant blend of all whetting flavours, an Abu Hamed—gin, vermouth, Angostura, lime-juice, soda?

Mix it in due proportions; put in especially plenty of soda-and then drink. For this is to drink indeed. The others were only flushing your body with liquid as you might flush a drain. But this! This splashes round your throat, slides softly down your gullet till you feel it run out into your stomach. It spreads blessedly through body and spirit not swirling through, like the Atbara, but irrigating, like the Nile. It is soil in the sand, substance in the void, life in death. Your sap runs again, your biltong muscles. take on elasticity, your mummy bones toughen. Your self has sprung up alive, and you almost think you know how it feels to rise from the dead.

Thenceforward the Sudan is a sensuous paradise. There is nothing like that first drink after sunset, but you are only half irrigated yet: the first drink at dinner-yes, and the second and the culminating whisky-and-soda-can give rich moments. Then

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