Playing with Fire: A Story of the Soudan War

by James Grant

A boat thereon, could he but find one, might be the means of ultimate escape, by taking him lower down the stream to more civilized regions.

Anyway, he could not be worse off, be in greater hourly peril, or have a more dark future, than when in the zereba, unless, too probably, thirst and starvation came upon him.

While the darkness of night lasted, he had a certain chance of safety and concealment, and he dared scarcely long for day and the perils it might bring forth in a land where every man's hand was certain to be against him.

He was totally defenceless, unarmed—oh, thought he, for a weapon of any description, that he might strike, if not a blow for liberty or life, at least one in defiance and for vengeance!

So, full of vague and desperate yet hopeful ideas, he pushed in the direction to where he knew the river lay. On its banks he hoped to obliterate or leave behind all trace of his footsteps, for he knew but too well the risk he ran of recapture on his flight or absence being discovered; and that there were Arabs in the zereba who had applied themselves diligently to the study of tracking or tracing the human foot.

So acute are these men of vision that they can know whether the footsteps belong to their own or to another tribe, and consequently whether a friend or a foe has passed that way; they know by the depth of the impression whether the man bore a load or not; by the regularity of the steps whether the man was fatigued or fresh and active, and hence can calculate to a nicety the chances of overtaking him; whether he has trodden in sand or on grass, and bruised its blades, and by the appearance of the traces whether the stranger had passed on that day or several days before.

Malcolm Skene knew all this, and that with dawn they would be like scenting beagles on his trail, hence his intense anxiety to reach the river's bank.

Swiftly the dawn came in, red and fiery, and his own shadow and the shadows of every object were cast far behind him. He looked back again and again; no sign of pursuit was in his rear. In the distance he saw a few Arab huts with sakias or water-wheels, and then with something like a start of joy that elicited an exclamation, he got a glimpse of the river, rolling clear and blue, its banks a stripe of narrow green, between the rocky, rugged, inexorable black mountains; but there no boat floated on and no sail whitened the yellowish blue of the Nile. But the morning light was vivid, the breeze from the river was pleasant and exultant, the glories of Nature were around him, yet anxiety made him gasp for breath as he struggled forward.

Not a bird or other living thing was visible. The silence was intense, and not even an insect hummed amid the scrub mimosas; the hot, red sun came up in his unclouded glory. All seemed sad, solitary, yet intensely sunny.

Ere long he did hear a sound of life; it was the shrill cry of a little naked boy attending on a sakia wheel. Irrigation is done by the latter, which is driven by oxen turning a chain of water-jars, which admits of being lengthened as the river falls. It is usually enclosed in an edifice like an old tower, green with creeping plants, and as the boy drives the oxen, his cry and the creaking of the great wheel are sounds that never cease, day or night, by the Nile.