Before daylight we were awakened by the noise of voices crying and quarrelling; and there were two black negresses upbraiding us, and beyond them was a group of agitated natives. It appeared that we were desecrating the village mosque. Having soothed the inhabitants, we started. That day we rode from 6 a.m. to 7.30 p.m. with a halt of an hour and a half at midday, travelling 40 miles in twelve hours, good going for baggage camels with sore backs. By that time I was getting sore, too. We slept that night at Absarat, started the next morning (29th December) at 8.30, and rode to Abu Fatmeh, arriving at 4 p.m. Starting next morning at nine o'clock, we arrived at Kaibur at 5 p.m. Here, to my intense relief, we picked up Colville and his steam pinnace, in which we instantly embarked for Korti.
During the last three days and a half we had been thirty-two hours in the saddle (which, strictly speaking, my camel had not) and a part of my anatomy was quite worn away. I lay down in the pinnace and hoped to become healed.
We did not know it; but the same evening, General Sir Herbert Stewart's Desert Column left Korti upon the great forced march of the forlorn hope.
The pinnace, whose furnaces were burning wood, most of which was wet and green, pounded slowly up river until we met the steamer Nassifara, into which I transferred myself. Blissful was the rest in that steamer after my two months' tremendous toil getting the boats through the Bab-el-Kebir and the long ride across the desert. So I lay in the steamer and lived on the height of diet, fresh meat, milk, butter and eggs, till my tunic hardly held me. I did not then know why Lord Wolseley had sent for me in so great a hurry.
CHAPTER XXVI
THE SOUDAN WAR (Continued)
IV. THE FIRST MARCH OF THE DESERT COLUMN
NOTE
By the end of December, 1884, the whole of the expedition was in process of concentrating at Korti. At Korti the Nile fetches a wide arc north-eastward. The chord of the arc, running south-eastward, runs from Korti to Metemmeh, and Shendi, which stands on the farther, or east, bank. From Korti to Metemmeh is 176 miles across the desert. Shendi was the rendezvous at which the troops were to meet Gordon's steamers sent down by him from Khartoum. Wolseley's object in sending Lord Charles Beresford with the Naval Brigade was that he should take command of the steamers, which, filled with troops, were to proceed up to Khartoum. The first business of the Desert Column under General Sir Herbert Stewart, was to seize the wells of Jakdul, which lay 100 miles distant from Korti, and to hold them, thus securing the main water supply on the desert route and an intermediate station between Metemmeh and the base at Korti. Having obtained possession of the wells, the Guards' Battalion was to be left there, while the remainder of the Column returned to Korti, there to be sufficiently reinforced to return to Jakdul, and to complete the march to Metemmeh. Such was the original idea. The reason why sufficient troops and transport were not sent in the first instance, thereby avoiding the necessity of the return of the greater part of the Column to Korti, and its second march with the reinforcements, seems to have been the scarcity of camels.