hat it meant for those who went on
that nocturnal march; who crept up in two lines, one along the river
and the other along an abandoned railway track, moving through the
black night; and in the black night encamped, and waited for the
rising of the moon. Anyhow, the tale told of it strikes this note,
especially in one touch of what can only be called a terrible
triviality. I mean the reference to the new noise heard just before
day-break, revealing the nearness of the enemy: the dreadful drum of
Islam, calling for prayer to an awful God--a God not to be worshipped
by the changing and sometimes cheerful notes of harp or organ, but
only by the drum that maddens by mere repetition.

But the third of Kitchener's lines of approach remains to consider.
The surprise attack, which captured the riverside village of Firket,
had eventually led, in spite of storms that warred on the advance like
armies, and in one place practically wiped out a brigade, to the fall
of Dongola itself. But Dongola was not the high place of the enemy; it
was not there that Gordon died or that Abdullahi was still alive. Far
away up the dark river were the twin cities of the tragedy, the city
of the murder and the city of the murderer. It was in relation to this
fixed point of fact that Kitchener's next proceeding is seen to be
supremely characteristic. He was so anxious to do one thing that he
was cautious about doing it. He was more concerned to obtain a success
than to appear to deserve it; he did not want a moral victory, but a
mathematical certainty. So far from following up the dash in the dark,
upon Firket or Dongola, with more romantic risks, he decided not to
advance on the Mahdi's host a minute faster than men could follow him
building a railway. He created behind him a colossal causeway of
communications, going out alone into wastes where there was and had
been no other mortal trace or track. The engineering genius of
Girouard, a Canadian, designed and developed it with what was,
considering the nature of the task, brilliant rapidity; but by the
standards of desert warfare it must have seemed that Kitchener and his
English made war as slowly as grass grows or orchards bear fruit. The
horsemen of Araby, darting to and fro like swallows, must have felt as
if they were menaced by the advance of a giant snail. But it was a
snail that left a shining track unknown to those sands; for the first
time since Rome decayed something was being made there