five prisoners, together with a barge laden with grain, after a brush with some dervishes on the right bank of the Nile.

During the storm which continues to rage here the British outposts last night heard the patter of hoofs, and suddenly a dervish horseman rode up, shouting “Allah!" and hurled his spear over their heads; then, wheeling round, he galloped away

unhurt.

XXXI.

THE RECONNAISSANCES.

REVEILLE at four had forestalled daybreak; at five we were between dawn and sunrise. Inside the swarming zariba of camp Sayal impatient bugles were hurrying whites and blacks under arms. Outside it the desert dust threw up a sooty film before the yellow east; the cavalry and camel - corps were forming up for the day's reconnaissance. Four squadrons of British 21st Lancers on the left, nine squadrons of Egyptian horsemen on the right with the horse guns, they trotted jangling into broad columns of troops, and spread fan-wise over the desert.

The camel-corps stayed a moment to practise a bit of drill of their own. One moment they were a huge oblong phalanx of waving necks and riders silhouetted against the sunrise; a couple of words in Turkish from their Bey and the necks were waving alone with the riders in a square round them; an instant more and camels and men had all knelt down. The camelcorps was a flat field of heads and humps hedged with

a shining quickset of bayonets. That rehearsed, they loped away to the extreme right: they can wait longer for their water than the horses, so that their portion is always the outer desert.

One instant we were with the main army by the zariba. The next-so it seemed after a few days of marching with the infantry-we were off and clear away. The screen was spread far out before the toiling infantry, and the enemy who would harass or even look at them must slip through us or break us if he could. It looked little enough like either. As soon as our scouts were off the country was full of them.

It was the last day of August—above a month since the first battalions had left the Atbara, two days before we were to take Omdurman, and the first shot of the campaign was yet unfired. But before us rose cliff-like from the river, and sloped gently down to the plain, the outline of Seg-el-Taib hill; from that were only a dozen miles to Kerreri; from Kerreri were only ten to Omdurman.

surely see.

From the hill we should

So hoofs pattered, and curb-chains jingled, and stirrups rang, and behold we were round the inland base of Seg-el-Taib and scrambling up its shaly rise. From the top we looked out at the ten-mile reach of river and the hundred-mile stretch of plain, rejoicing in the young sunlight. On our left, four gunboats-two white of

DERVISHES AT LAST!

251

the new class, two black of the old-trudged deviously, slowly, surely up under the right bank. Across the shining steel ribbon of Nile lay a vast tangle of green-only a fifth funnel and Maxim-platforms crawling along its horizon revealed it an island. On our right, the brilliant mimosa-scrub-in this rainy country mimosa grows real leaves and the leaves are green -stretched forward to a dim double hill, a saddle in the middle, gentle ridges dipping down at each end to river and desert. At our feet, round a sandy creek, clustered white and brown cavalry like bees, lances planted in the sand, men bent over bits, horses down on their knees for the water. In the desert a slowly advancing lozenge under a cloud of dust stood for the camel corps. Over our shoulders a black tide licked yet more slowly southward; that was infantry and guns. Sun, river, birds, green; grim, stealthy gunboats and that awfully advancing host; it combined into the most heart-winning, most heart-quaking picture of all the war.

But we were looking for somebody to kill. Mudwalled villages, as everywhere, fringed the river-bank; by one the cavalry were watering; another further on focussed the landscape with the conical-pointed tomb of some sheikh or holy man. And-what?-the glasses, quick!-yes, by George it is! One, two, three, four, five-our scouts? impossible; there are our scouts a mile this side of them. No: Dervishes

dervish horse; the first sight of them, for me, in the campaign. Dervish horse three miles this side of Kerreri.

Stand to your horses! Prepare to mount! Mount! This time the plain was fuller, the jingling merrier, the bobbing lance-points more alert than ever. On and on-a troop through the dense bush, a couple of squadrons in line over the open gravel, scrambling through a rocky rent in the ground, halting to breathe the horses and signal the scouts-but always on again. Always, by comparison with infantry, we seemed to fly, to spread out by magic, to leave the miles behind us in a flash.

But the Dervishes seemed to have vanished, as their wont is, swallowed up by dervish-land. We had already passed the spot chosen for the night's camp; we were to go on a mile or two beyond "to make it good," as they say. At last we halted. "We shall water here," said the Colonel," and then go home." Then suddenly somebody looked forward through his glasses. "By Gad, the Gippy cavalry are charging!"

"That's not the Gippy cavalry," sings out somebody else; "that's our advanced squadron." Mount and clatter off again. I didn't see them, but it was good enough to gallop for; and now, sure enough, we plunge through the mimosa and find the advanced squadron pressing on furiously, and the best gentleman rider in the army with a dervish lance in his hand. The squadron found them in the bush, and galloped at