WHAT THE GUNBOATS DID.

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two Egyptians had to be cut out through the bottom of the boat. Yet here were three vessels steaming up and down unperturbed, right under Mahmud's nose. The value of their services it would be quite impossible to exaggerate: they were worth all the rest of the Intelligence Department put together. From their reports it was known that the dervishes had crossed to Shendi and were coming down the river. Moreover, you may imagine that officers of her Majesty's navy did not confine their activity to looking on. A day or two before this Mahmud had been transferring his war material in barges from Metemmeh to Shendi. Knowing the ways of "the devils," as they amiably call the gunboats, he had entrenched a couple of hundred riflemen to cover the crossing. But one boat steamed cheerfully up to the bank and turned on the Maxims, while the other sunk one nuggar and captured two. A fourth lay in quite shallow water under the very muzzles of the dervish rifles. But on each boat are carried about half a company of Egyptian troops with a white officer. While the Maxims poppled away above them, the detachment-it was of the 15th Egyptians on this occasion-landed and cut out the nuggar before its owners' eyes. With men capable of such things as this about on the river, it was only by drilling a hole in the bottom of their boats and sinking them during the day that the dervishes could keep any craft to cross the river in at all.

F

The second day at Fort Atbara I stepped out after lunch, and there were two white sweltering gunboats instead of one. Everybody who had nothing else to do hurried as fast as the heat would let them down to the river. There the first thing they saw was an angareb being laboriously guided ashore by four native soldiers on it lay a white man. He was a sergeant of marines, shot in the leg while directing the fire of the forward Maxim. "The devils have hit me," they said he cried out, with justly indignant surprise as he felt the bullet, then jumped to the gun and turned it himself on the quarter the shot came from. That was in the early morning; now he was very pale and a little limp, but smiling. Then came down the doctor hastily. "Didn't I say he wasn't to be brought ashore?" he said. "All right, sir," answered the wounded man, still resolutely smiling; "I expect I'm in for hospital anyhow." And away to hospital they bore him, for the boat would be up river again by dawn the next day.

Meantime the detachment of soldiers were stepping ashore with cheerful grins. It was easy to see how valuable was this gunboat work in giving the Egyptians confidence. True, they had lost one man wounded and had a few chips knocked off the sternwheel; but had they not landed at Aliab-thirty miles from Fort Atbara-driven off the dervishes, and captured donkeys and loot? The loot was being

AN EXCITING SERVICE.

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unladen at the moment-an angareb or two and odd garments, especially many bundles of rough riverside hay. "Take that up to my old horse," said the lieutenant in command, satisfaction in his tones. there any polo this afternoon?"

"Is

It was hard to say whether this work best suited the young naval officer or the young naval officer best suited the work. Steaming up and down the river in command of a ship of his own, bombarding here, reconnoitring there, landing elsewhere for a brush with the dervishes, and then again a little way farther to pick up loot,-the work had all the charm of war and blockade-running and poaching combined. If a dervish shell did happen to smash the wheel where would the boat be, perhaps seventy miles from any help? It was said the Sirdar was a little nervous about them, and to my inexperience it was a perpetual wonder that the boats came back from every trip. But somehow, thanks to just a dash of caution in their audacity, they always did come back. Impudently daring in attack, with a happy eye to catch the latest moment for retreat, they were just the cutting-out heroes of one's youth come to life. They might have walked straight out of the ' Boy's Own Paper.'

Every returning boat brought fresh news of the advance. Dervishes at Aliab, even if not in force, could not but mean a movement towards attack. It was quite impossible to wear out the hospitality of

Fort Atbara, but duty began to wonder what the rest of the army was doing. So I recaptured my camelpeacefully grazing in the nearest area of dervish raid, and very angry at being called on to work after three days of idleness-and bumped away north towards Berber.

X.

THE MARCH OUT.

ALAS for the Berber season-for the sprightly promise of its budding, the swift tragedy of its blight!

It would have been the most brilliant social year the town has ever known. Berber is peculiarly fitted for fashionable display: its central street would hold four Regent Streets abreast, and the low mud walls, with one-storeyed mud-houses just peeping over them, make it look wider yet. On this magnificent avenue the merchant princes of Berber display their rich emporia. Mortimer, Angelo, Walker, and half-a-dozen ending in -poulo, had brought caravans over the desert from Suakim, until you could buy oysters and asparagus, table - napkins and brilliantine, in the middle of the Sudan. Then there are the cafés,"Officers' Club and Mineral Waters" is the usual title of a Sudan café,-where you could drink mastik and kinds of whisky, and listen to limpid streams of modern Greek from the mouths of elegants who shave twice and even three times a-week. There at sun