He did not say this, because he never said anything, but this is what he indicated by his calm preparations. He knew that the dervishes were frothing at the mouth and praying Allah to give them another chance to swim in gore, so he simply edged up to within striking distance of them and picked out his ground and waited. A kinetoscope hero would have galloped up and down the line shouting, "Up, men, and at them!" But Kitchener was not a hero. He was business manager of an abattoir. His object was not to win a great battle, but to exterminate a species. And he probably did one of the neatest jobs of house cleaning on record.
The bloodthirsty mob, led by the Khalifa, as principal maniac, charged across an open plain. Each determined dervish carried in his right hand a six foot spear, with which he hoped to do considerable damage. When he still lacked about a mile of being within poking distance of the hated infidel, the machine guns opened up and began to sweep the plain back and forth in long regular swaths, just as the sickle sweeps through the yellow grain. It was quite a handicap for the invincible children of Allah. They could not use their six foot spears on anyone a mile away, and before they could recover from the chagrin occasioned by this unexpected move on the part of the enemy, about eleven thousand of them had winged their way to eternal happiness and the others were radiating in all directions, pursued by those who wished to civilise them and bring them under British control. Those of the dervishes who escaped are supposed to be still running. At least they never came back to start another Messiah movement.
Ten years ago the Soudan was sealed to the whole world and death waited for the unbeliever who crossed the border. To-day the table d'hôte roams unafraid, and the illustrated post card blooms even as the rose.
The Nile of which you have read and along which are scattered the simon pure monuments of antiquity is the six hundred miles of winding river between Assouan, or First Cataract, and the sea. For the entire distance, until it spreads into a fan-shaped delta and filters into the Mediterranean, the stream is walled in by flat-topped hills of barren aspect. They are capped with limestone and carpeted about with shifting sands, and they look for all the world like the mesas of New Mexico and Arizona, for they lie baking in the same kind of clarified sunshine. This meandering hollow between the rugged hill ranges is the Valley of the Nile. Here and there the hills close in until the river banks are high and chalky cliffs. At one point the valley spreads to a width of thirty-three miles.
East and west of the hills are vast areas of desert without even a spear of vegetation except where there is a miraculous rise of water to the surface. These spots are grateful landmarks of clustered palms and are known as oases.
The Valley of the Nile would be just as bare and monotonous as an asphalt pavement were it not for the fact that once a year the Nile overflows. It has been overflowing every year for thousands of years, bringing down from the mountains of Abyssinia and the far-away regions of tropical rains a spreading volume of muddy water. Every winter, when the dwindling stream gets back into the customary bed, it has left a layer of black sediment over the inundated district. So many layers of sediment have been deposited that now the rich black soil is thirty to fifty feet deep along the river, thinning out as it meets the slope of the desert. Unlike our prairie soil of the Middle West, the Nile farms are not underlaid with clay. The Nile soil is black all the way down to limestone—a floury mineral powder of even composition. The only parts of Egypt which can be cultivated are those touched by the annual overflow. Egypt is really a ribbon of alluvial soil following the stream on either side. The tourist standing on the top deck of a Nile steamer can see both east and west the raw and broken edges of the desert.
The entire population lives on the river, literally and figuratively. Dark-robed women come down to the stream in endless processions to fill their water jars, and it seems that about every forty feet or so all the way up from Cairo the industrious fellah is lifting water up the bank and irrigating his little field with the same old-fashioned sweep and bucket arrangement that was in use when Joseph came over to Egypt and attracted the attention of Potiphar's wife. The Egyptian farmer is called a fellah. The clothing that he wears would wad a gun—that is, a rifle, not a shotgun. He puts in at least fourteen hours a day and his pay is from ten to fifteen cents. Mr. Peasley told a tourist the other day that the song "He's a jolly good fellah" originated in Egypt during the time of the Ptolemies. This is a sample of the kind of idiotic observation that is supposed to enliven a so-called pleasure trip.
But let us get back to the river, for in Egypt one must get back to the river at least once every twenty minutes. The Nile is Egypt and Egypt is the Nile. All this description may sound like a few pages from the trusty red guide book, and yet the word "Egypt" will have no meaning to the reader who does not get a clear panoramic vision of this wonderfully slim-waisted country. Nearly six hundred miles long and yet containing only twelve thousand five hundred square miles—about the size of Maryland.
The strip of black land which yields the plentiful crops is nowhere more than ten miles wide, a mere fringe of fertility weaving along through dryness and desolation. Anywhere along the river if you will climb to the rocky plateau, you will see the slow moving river, probably a half-mile wide, as a glassy thread on which are strung fields of living green, bordered by the dreary uplifts of desert. The traveller who goes by boat from Cairo to Assouan sees all of Egypt. The cities and temples and tombs of olden times were perched on the high spots or planted in the bare hills, so as to be safe from the annual rise of waters. Anything worth seeing in the whole country is within an easy donkey ride of the river bank. The river is the only artery of travel. There is a railway, but it follows the river all the way up to Assouan.
It would seem that the country was especially laid out and punctuated with "sights" for the convenience of the modern traveller, for the visitor who goes up the Nile and stops off at the right spots can do a clean job of sight seeing without doubling on his tracks.