the edge of a pebbly desert, which left but a skirting
of one to three miles of loam and rank vegetation between its
measureless sterility and the tawny Nile waters. The small rounded
pebbles and the fine sand of the Nubian wilderness were surely
fashioned in some great lake or sea of a prehistoric past. Far as we
were from the dervishes, a childish terror of them was entertained by
the servants. At the last moment several domestics decamped, my cook
among them. I rode back three miles to catch the rascal. With unwonted
alacrity and prescience he had recrossed to the opposite bank before I
arrived at the place of bivouac, and, having no time, I had to retrace
my steps without his enforced attendance. It had been arranged that
the column should only go fifteen miles the first day. What with
winding and twisting to avoid flooded khors or shallow gulleys we
marched over twenty miles I fancy. At any rate, with no protracted
halting for meals or for baiting the animals, we trudged on throughout
the heat and worry of the day until sunset. It was putting both men
and animals to the severest possible strain, and few of the soldiers,
at least, had had any preliminary hardening, for they had been
travelling for days by boat and train and were out of condition. As a
rule, the Lancers trotted a few miles ahead, halted, dismounted, and
waited for the convoy to come up. Then they would ride on again, halt,
and so on, repeating the proceeding many times during each day's
march. From start to finish the column was ever a loosely-jointed
body. The pace was slow, little more than 2 1/4 miles an hour, though Sir
Herbert Stewart's Bayuda desert column managed to average upon a
longer and almost waterless route, from Korti to Metemmeh, 2 3/4 miles an
hour. In that campaign, however, most of our marching was done during
the cooler hours of very early morning and late eventide.

The head of the column turned in towards the river about three p.m. on
the 16th, at Makaberab, or, as the natives call it, Omdabiya--_i.e._,
the place of hyenas. For over a mile, men and animals had to make
their way through halfa-grass scrub, and then over bare alluvial land,
deeply sun-cracked and scored in all directions. The ground was
cris-crossed like a chessboard, the lines being a foot to two feet
apart, and four to six inches wide, and several feet in depth. There
were numberless spills through these pitfalls. One camel snapped his
leg, and many mules and ho