oming successively barer and barer. Two trains were
required for the Battalion and its possessions, one leaving at 7.17 a.m.
and the other at 4.15 p.m. They were composed of open trucks in which
the men were packed with little regard to comfort. It was not a
luxurious journey, but fortunately it was not a long one. After skirting
the inundations the line ran for some miles across almost flat desert,
and then entered a country of sand hills, writhing and twisting among
the tumbled ridges till it reached Romani. Here we passed on to a branch
line which took us north to the coast.

Our camp at Mahamdiya had been occupied by the Scottish Horse. It was
pitched on a slope of sand less than a mile from the railway, and half a
mile or so from the sea. The sea was the great feature of Mahamdiya. Its
deep blueness rested the eye, wearied by the perpetual glare of the
sand. The prevailing north wind blowing straight off it tempered the
heat--and most important of all, it gave us the opportunity of being
cool and clean for a delicious half-hour as often as we could spare the
time to get down to it. No parade, not even the infrequent "fall in for
pay," was so welcome as a bathing parade. Our supply of fresh water was
extremely limited, and as drinking comes with most of us before washing,
we should have been a dirty lot indeed without the sea. Even as it was,
salt water, like a famous soap, won't wash clothes, and our hosiery
suffered accordingly. Drinking water was issued at stated intervals, in
the presence of an officer--and that was another occasion on which there
were no absentees.

Some way east of the camp ran a line of barbed wire in a great sweep
from the sea to the south, finally turning west to protect the whole
locality. Behind it was a series of little posts occupied nightly by
half the Battalion, while the rest slept in camp. The most northerly
post was not a popular one. The roar of the surf forced the sentries to
rely entirely on their eyesight; while the alarming number of marauding
crabs, which manoeuvred over the area all night, gave one an uneasy
feeling which usually begot a nightmare.

In front of the outpost line lay a great expanse of dry salt-lake,
separated from the sea by a hundred yards or so of sand dune, and
stretching away as far as the eye could reach, a sheet of greyish white.
These dry lakes or marshes, Sabkhet, to give them their local name, are
a feature of northern Sinai. One very large one, at