A PICTURESQUE CARAVAN.

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looked so neat and workmanlike, on the donkey became the pots and sticks of a gipsy encampment. My tent was a slipshod monstrosity, my dressing - case blatantly secondhand, my washing basin was positively indecent. To make things worse, they had trimmed my baggage up with garbage of their own -dirty bags of dates and cast-off clothing. They mostly insisted on riding the smallest and heaviestladen donkeys themselves, jumping at a bound on to the jogging load of baggage with four legs pattering underneath, and had to be flogged off again. And to finish my shame, here was I trudging behind, cracking and flicking at donkeys and half-naked black men, like a combination of gipsy, horse - coper, and slave-driver.

But we travelled. Some of the donkeys were hardly bigger than collies, and their drivers did all that laziness and ineptitude could suggest to keep them back; but we travelled. It came to my turn of the horse about half-past six or so: certainly he was not a beast to make comparisons on, but the donkeys left him behind unless you made him trot, which was obviously cruel. I should say they kept up four miles an hour with a little driving.

We gave ourselves an hour at eight for breakfast, and the end of the march was in soft sand under a cruel sun. It was not till nearly one that the camel. thorn-all stalk and prickles, no leaves-gave way to palms again, and again we looked down on the

Nile. A single palm gives almost as much shade as an umbrella with the silk off, but we found four together, and a breeze from the river, and a drinkO that first drink in a Sudan camp!-and lunch and a sleep, and a tub and tea, and we reflected on our ten hours' march and were happy. At five we joggled off again.

We lost the place we had intended to camp at, and the desert began to get rugged and to produce itself ever so far both ways, like the parallel lines in Euclid, and we never got any farther forward on it. It got to be a kind of treadmill—we going on and the desert going back under us. But at last we did get to a place-didn't know its name, nor cared-and went to sleep a little more. And in the pale morning by happy luck we found two camels, and two of us trotted joyously forward past swimming mirages and an endless string of ruined mud villages into mud Berber. The donkeys were not much behind either: they did about seventy miles in forty-two hours. But I am afraid it must have been the death of the horse, and I am sorry. It seems a cruelty to kill him just as he was beginning to be immortal.

VI.

THE SIRDAR.

MAJOR-GENERAL SIR HORATIO HERBERT KITCHENER is forty-eight years old by the book; but that is irrelevant. He stands several inches over six feet, straight as a lance, and looks out imperiously above most men's heads; his motions are deliberate and strong; slender but firmly knit, he seems built for tireless, steel-wire endurance rather than for power or agility: that also is irrelevant. Steady passionless eyes shaded by decisive brows, brick-red rather full cheeks, a long moustache beneath which you divine an immovable mouth; his face is harsh, and neither appeals for affection nor stirs dislike. All this is irrelevant too: neither age, nor figure, nor face, nor any accident of person, has any bearing on the essential Sirdar. You could imagine the character just the same as if all the externals were different. He has no age but the prime of life, no body but one to carry his mind, no face but one to keep his brain behind. The brain and the will are the essence and the whole of the man- -a

brain and a will so perfect in their workings that, in the face of extremest difficulty, they never seem to know what struggle is. You cannot imagine the Sirdar otherwise than as seeing the right thing to do and doing it. His precision is so inhumanly unerring, he is more like a machine than a man. You feel that he ought to be patented and shown with pride at the Paris International Exhibition. British Empire : Exhibit No. I., hors concours, the Sudan Machine.

It was aptly said of him by one who had closely watched him in his office, and in the field, and at mess, that he is the sort of feller that ought to be made manager of the Army and Navy Stores. The aphorist's tastes lay perhaps in the direction of those more genial virtues which the Sirdar does not possess, yet the judgment summed him up perfectly. He would be a splendid manager of the Army and Navy Stores. There are some who nurse a desperate hope that he may some day be appointed to sweep out the War Office. He would be a splendid manager of the War Office. He would be a splendid manager of anything.

But it so happens that he has turned himself to the management of war in the Sudan, and he is the complete and the only master of that art. Beginning life in the Royal Engineers-a soil reputed more favourable to machinery than to human nature-he early turned to the study of the Levant. He was one of Beaconsfield's military vice-consuls in Asia Minor; he

FIFTEEN YEARS OF EGYPT.

47

was subsequently director of the Palestine Exploration Fund. At the beginning of the Sudan troubles he appeared. He was one of the original twenty-five officers who set to work on the new Egyptian army. And in Egypt and the Sudan he has been ever sinceon the staff generally, in the field constantly, alone with natives often, mastering the problem of the Sudan always. The ripe harvest of fifteen years is that he knows everything that is to be learned of his subject. He has seen and profited by the errors of others as by their successes. He has inherited the wisdom and the achievements of his predecessors. He came at the right hour, and he was the right man.

Captain R.E., he began in the Egyptian army as second-in-command of a regiment of cavalry. In Wolseley's campaign he was Intelligence Officer. During the summer of 1884 he was at Korosko, negotiating with the Ababdeh sheiks in view of an advance across the desert to Abu Hamed; and note how characteristically he has now bettered the then abandoned project by going that way to Berber and Khartum himself-only with a railway! The idea of the advance across the desert he took over from Lord Wolseley, and indeed from immemorial Arab caravans; and then, for his own stroke of insight and resolution amounting to genius, he turned a raid into an irresistible certain conquest, by superseding camels with the railway. Others had thought of the desert route: the Sirdar, correcting Korosko to Halfa, used