t on the Canal was now somewhat remote, and work
could be carried on in comparative safety.

One day, perhaps, a scribe will rise up and write of the doings of the
Royal Engineers in this war, more particularly of their deeds in such
places as Salonica, Mesopotamia, East Africa, and Egypt; where, in addition
to the usual shortage of tools and material, they had to wrestle with every
conceivable kind of geographical obstacle that a bountiful Nature could
place in their way. The present scribe can only write of what they did in
Egypt and Palestine, and not half of that can be told.

As far as Kantara is concerned they came, they saw, they conquered. What
they saw was a desert which they proceeded to transform into a city,
certainly of tents and huts, but "replete with every convenience"--as the
house-agents say. As a start they pensioned off the aged chain ferry into
decent retirement and built a goodly swing bridge, over which were brought
timber to be cut into beams and joists; nuts and bolts and screws, and an
olla podrida of materials.

When this was done a gentleman called the Assistant Director of Works came
and made a plan of the city. Here a difficulty arose. In this climate a
white man has his limitations, and one of them is that hard manual labour
when the sun is summer-high is exhausting in the extreme, and is, moreover,
explicitly forbidden between the hours of 10 a.m. and 4 p.m. by the
authorities.

It was then that the voice of the Egyptian Labour Corps was heard in the
land. Little is known outside the country of this admirable corps, yet it
is scarcely too much to say that they saved the situation here as
elsewhere. Recruited from almost every class of the native community, from
the towns and cities, from the Delta, from their "belods" in the far-off
Soudan, they came in thousands to dig and delve, to fetch and carry, to do
a hundred things impossible for a white man to do in that climate. It is
difficult to over-estimate their usefulness; though not as a rule big men,
they would carry for considerable distances weights that a far bigger white
man failed even to lift.

Their staple diet consisted of bread, onions, lentils, rice, dates, and
oil--with perhaps a little meat after sunset. They drank prodigious
quantities of water, and could not in fact go for long without. Firmly but
fairly treated by their British officers and non-commissioned officers,
they went anywhere and did anything; and wherever yo