ultivable though mostly uncultivated strip, long neglected and silted
up with fine sand drifted into dunes, from which scattered, scraggy
dom palms and prickly mimosa bushes grew. Between the branches of these
sombre trees the river gleamed, a cool and attractive flood. On the left
was the desert, here broken by frequent rocks and dry watercourses. From
Bashtinab to Abadia another desert section of fifty miles was necessary
to avoid some very difficult ground by the Nile bank. From Abadia to the
Atbara the last stretch of the line runs across a broad alluvial expanse
from whose surface plane-trees of mean appearance, but affording welcome
shade, rise, watered by the autumn rains. The fact that the railway
was approaching regions where rain is not an almost unknown phenomenon
increased the labour of construction. To prevent the embankments from
being washed away in the watercourses, ten bridges and sixty culverts
had to be made; and this involved the transport over the railway of more
than 1,000 tons of material in addition to the ordinary plant.

By the arrival of the reinforcements at Berber the fighting force at the
front was doubled: doubled also was the business of supply. The task of
providing the food of an army in a desert, a thousand miles from their
base, and with no apparent means of subsistence at the end of the day's
march, is less picturesque, though not less important, than the building
of railways along which that nourishment is drawn to the front. Supply
and transport stand or fall together; history depends on both; and in
order to explain the commissariat aspect of the River War, I must again
both repeat and anticipate the account. The Sirdar exercised a direct
and personal supervision over the whole department of supply, but
his action was restricted almost entirely to the distribution of the
rations. Their accumulation and regular supply were the task of Colonel
Rogers, and this officer, by three years of exact calculation and
unfailing allowance for the unforeseen, has well deserved his high
reputation as a feeder of armies.

The first military necessity of the war was, as has been described, to
place the bulk of the Egyptian army at Akasha. In ordinary circumstances
this would not have been a serious commissariat problem. The frontier
reserves of food were calculated to meet such an emergency. But in 1895
the crops in Egypt had been much below the average. At the beginning of
1896 there was a great