end of it must be at Abu Hamed already-a vista of rails, sleepers, boxes, camels, and soldiers, and two turkeys, the property of a voluptuous Brigadier, bubbling with indignation through the darkness. However she ran out smoothly enough towards midnight. We slept peacefully, four of us—the other made night hideous with kicks, and exhortations to visionary soldiers to fire low-and in the morning woke up rather less than a hundred miles on our way. But then the first hundred miles is all up-hill, though the gradient is nowhere difficult. The train ran beautifully, for while the surface sand is very easy to work it has a firm bottom, and the rails do not settle. All day we rumbled on prosperously, with no mischance more serious than a broken rail, and we crawled safely over that.

Half the day we read and half the day we played cards, and when it grew dark we sang, for all the world like Thomas Atkins. Every now and then we varied the monotony with a meal; the train stopped frequently, and even when it did not the pace was slow enough for an agile butler to serve lunch by jumping off his truck and climbing on to the saloon foot-board. The scenery, it must be owned, was monotonous, and yet not without haunting beauty. Mile on mile, hour on hour, we glided through sheer desert. Yellow sand to right and left-now stretching away endlessly, now a valley between small broken hills. Sometimes the hills sloped away from us, then they closed in again.

A DESERT SWINDON.

29

Now they were diaphanous blue on the horizon, now soft purple as we ran under their flanks. But always they were steeped through and through with sun-hazy, immobile, silent. It looked like a part of the world quite new, with none of the bloom rubbed off. It seemed almost profanity that I should be intruding on the sanctity of the prime.

But I was not the first intruder. Straight, firm, and purposeful ran the rails. Now they split into a double line: here was another train waiting-a string of empty trucks-and also a tent, a little hut made of sleeper baulks, a tank, points, and a board with the inscription "No. 5." This was a station-a wayside station. But No. 6 is a Swindon of the desert. Every train stops there half-an-hour or more to fill up with water, for there is a great trifoliate well there. Also the train changes drivers. And here, a hundred miles into the heart of the Nubian desert, two years ago a sanctuary of inviolate silence, where no blade of green ever sprang, where, possibly, no foot trod since the birth of the world, here is a little colony of British engine-drivers. They have a little rest-house shanty of board and galvanised iron; there are pictures from the illustrated papers on the walls, and a pup at the door. There they swelter and smoke and spit and look out at the winking rails and the red-hot sand, and wait till their turn comes to take the train. They don't love the life-who would? -but they stick to it like Britons, and take the trains

out and home. They, too, are not the meanest of the conquerors of the Sudan.

Towards dusk mimosa bushes, dotted park-wise over the sand, began to rise up on both sides of us, then palms; soon we were in a thickish scrub. The air cooled and moistened from death to life: we were back again on the Nile, at Abu Hamed. Thereafter we slept peacefully again, and awoke in the midst of a large camp of white tents. They unhooked the saloon, but the train crawled on, disgorging rails and sleepers, till it came to a place where a swarm of ellahin was shovelling up sand round the last metals. The naked embankment ran straight and purposeful as ever, so far as you could see. Small in the distance was a white man with a spirit-level.

IV.

THE CORRESPONDENT'S PROGRESS.

I SAT on a box of tinned beef, whisky, and other delicacies, dumped down on a slope of loose sand. Round me lay another similar case, a tent, bed, and bath, all collapsible and duly collapsed into a brown. canvas jacket, two brown canvas bags containing saddlery, towels, and table-linen, a chair and a table lashed together, a wash hand basin with shaving tackle concealed inside its green canvas cover, a brown bag with some clothes in it, a shining tin canteen, a cracking lunch-basket, a driving-coat, and a hunting-crop. On one side of me rose the embankment of the main line to Berber; fifty yards on it ended suddenly in the sand, and a swarm of Arabs were shovelling up more of it for their lives. On the other side of me, detached, empty, quite alone, stood the saloon which brought me from Halfa. It was going back again to-night, and then I should be quite loose and outcast in the smiling Sudan.

I sat and meditated on the full significance of the

simple military phrase, "line of communications." It is the great discovery of the Sirdar that he has recognised that in the Sudan the communications are the essence and heart of the whole problem. And now I recognised it too.

It was a long, long story already. I was now just at the threshold of what was regarded officially as the difficult part of the 1150 odd miles between Cairo and the front; I was still seventy miles or so from Berber -and my problem, instead of just beginning, appeared just on the point of an abrupt and humiliating finish. The original question was how I was to get myself and my belongings to the front; the threatened solution was that I should get there, if at all, on my feet, and that my belongings would serve to blaze the track for anybody desperate enough to follow.

I am not an old campaigner. The old campaigner, as you know, starts out with the clothes he stands up in and a tin-opener. The young campaigner provides the change of linen and tins for the old campaigner to open. So in Cairo I bought everything I could think of as likely to palliate a summer in the Sudan. I wore out my patience and my legs a whole week in drapers' shops, and saddlers' shops, and apothecaries' shops, and tobacconists' shops, and tinand-bottle shops, and general shops. I bought two horses and two nigger boys-one to look after the horses and one to look after me. One of them I bought through Cook, as one takes a railway-ticket;