AN ILL-CHOSEN SITE.

73

It seemed to me that daylight was very long in coming-that lines of khaki figures seemed to pass to and fro in an unlifting mist. But that was only for the first few sleepy moments. As the north wind got up with the sun it soon became very plain what was the

matter.

Dust! The camp was on land which had once been cultivated, black cotton land; and black cotton land when the wind blows is neither wholesome nor agreeable. It rose off the ground till the place was like London in a fog. On the horizon it lowered like thunder-clouds; close about you it whirled up like pepper when the lid of the castor comes off. You felt it, breathed it, smelt it, tasted it. It choked eyes and nose and ears, and you ground it between your teeth. After a few hours of it you forgot what being a man was like; you were merely clogging into a lump of Sudan.

It was a bad mistake to pitch on such a spot; and when you came to walk round the camp you saw how ill-equipped were the men to put up with it. Their heavy baggage-officers' and men's alike-had been left at rail-head; over 2500 men had come with 700 camels. The tents had arrived, but they were only just being unloaded from the steamer. The men were huddled under blankets stretched on four sticks; of the officers, some had tents, others sat in tiny elbowsqueezing tukls (huts of straw or rushes), such as the prophet Jonah would not have exchanged for his

gourd. There was hardly a shelter in the camp in which a man could stand upright. One or two good tukls had been built-wooden posts with beams lashed across them, and mats or coarse stems of halfa grass plaited between. But, taking the place as a whole, it was impossible to be comfortable, and especially impossible to be clean.

It was nobody's fault in particular, and in this good weather it did not particularly matter. It happened not to have begun stoking up at the time; when it likes it can be mid-summer in March. When it did begin, and especially if it came to a matter of summer quarters, such a camp as Debeika was an invitation to disease and death. You have to learn the Sudan's ways, they say, if you do not want the Sudan to eat you alive. The British brigade had to learn. Sure enough the Sirdar came to inspect it the day after, and on March 11 the brigade shifted camp to the empty and relatively clean village of Darmali, two miles higher up the river.

IX.

FORT ATBARA.

It needed only half a look at the Egyptian camp to convince you how much the British had to learn. The hospitable dinner-table was quite enough. In accordance with a detestable habit which I intend to correct in future, I arrived late for dinner: it was the fault of the camels, the camel-men, the servants, the guide, my companions, the country, and the weather. None the less kindly was I set down at table and ate of soup and fish, of ragout and fresh mutton and game, and was invited to drink hock, claret, champagne, whisky, gin, lime-juice, ginger-beer, Rosbach, and cognac, or any combination or permutation of the same. I was the guest of men who have been on the Sudan frontier for anything up to fifteen years, during which time they have learned the Sudan's ways and overcome its inhospitality.

As soon as everybody began to show signs of falling asleep at table-which hot days begun at four or five in the morning and worked hard through till half-past

roof.

seven soon lead you to consider the most natural phenomenon in the world-I went to bed under a The owner of the tukl was up the river, off Shendi, on a gunboat. His house was palatially built with painted beams from the spoils of a raid on Metemmeh, and plaited with palm-leaf and halfa Other officers preferred their tents; but the grass. insides of these were sunk anything from one foot to four underground, the excavation neatly backed with dried Nile mud, so that a ten-foot tent became a lofty and airy apartment. The last thing I saw was a vast upstanding oblong tukl, which looked capable of holding a company. I was told it was the house of the mess-servants of one Egyptian battalion. It was more palatial than all the edifices in the British camp put together.

la the morning it was blowing a sand-storm, and Bigshmen's eyes showed bloodshot through blue spectacles It was gritty between the teeth, and to wa'k up wind spelt blindness; yet it was clean sand, and did not form soil in the mouth like the black Just of Debeika. In the early morning Fort Atbara appeared through the driving cloud as through smoked a long walled camp, with its southern apex resting on the junction of Nile and Atbara. To find so strong a place in the lately won wilderness was a revelation, not of English energy, which is understood, but of Egyptian industry. The wall was over x feet high, firmly built of sun-dried mud; round it

A MONUMENT OF EGYPTIAN INDUSTRY.

77

had been a six-foot ditch, only the importunate sand had already half silted it up again. On the inside was a parapet, gun platforms with a couple of carefully clothed Maxims in each, a couple of guard-houses at the two main gates and a couple of blockhouses outside. Across the Atbara was a small fort; at the angle of the rivers a covered casemate gallery that would accommodate half a company precluded any attempt to turn the wall and attack from the foreshore. On the other side of the Nile was a smaller fort, walled and ditched likewise. In the inside straddled a crow's nest-built also with painted beams from Mahmud's house in Metemmeh-with a view that reached miles up both rivers. A couple of miles up the Atbara you could see dense mimosa thickets; so much of the bank as could get water has dropped back almost to virgin forest in the fourteen years of dervish devilry. But under the walls of Fort Atbara was neither mimosa nor Sodom apple nor any kind of scrub. Only a forest of stumps showed where the field of fire had been cleared-over a mile in every direction. Upright and regular among the stumps you could see a row of stakes; each marked a range of 100 yards up to 500: the Egyptian soldier was to hold his fire up to that and gain confidence by seeing his enemy go down. Best of all, the fort, though it dominated the country for miles, was itself hardly visible. From the ridge of the desert a mile away it was a few trees, the yardarms of a few sailing barges,