After a halt nine miles distant from Korti, and as many to the left of the Wady Makattem, the march was resumed under a peculiarly brilliant moonlight—one so bright that few present had ever seen anything like it before.
Not a cloud was visible in the far expanse of the firmament; there were millions upon millions of stars sparkling, but their brightness paled almost out in the brilliance of the moon. There were no leaves to shine in the dew, but showers of diamonds seemed to gem the yellow pebbles of the desert; and had birds been there, they might have sung as if a new day had dawned; yet how all unlike the warm glow of an Egyptian day was the icy splendour of the moonlight that mingled in one quarter with the coming redness of the east.
Every sword-blade, every rifle-barrel, every buckle and stirrup-iron, glinted out in light, while the figures of every camel and horse, soldier, and artillery-wheel were clearly defined as at noonday; and no sound broke the stillness save the shrill voices of the Somali camel-drivers.
It was soon after this that Major Barrow, when scouting with some Hussars, came upon a solitary messenger, bearer of a tiny scrap of paper, no larger than a postage stamp—one of the last missives from Gordon, dated 14th December, he being then shut up in Khartoum.
The moonlight faded; the red dawn came in, and still the march of the column went on; in front a dreary, sandy, and waterless desert; behind, the narrow streak of green that indicated the course of the Nile; and now our officers began to say to each other that 'if the camel corps alone was from the first deemed sufficient to relieve Khartoum, then why, at such enormous expense, exertion, and toil, were 3,000 infantry brought blundering up the Nile? And anon, if they were not sufficient, surely there was infinite danger in exposing the corps, unsupported, to the contingency of an overwhelming attack by the united forces of the Mahdi.'
It was found that there were wells, however, at Hamboka, El Howeiyat, and elsewhere, far apart, and that so far as water was concerned the practicability of the desert route to Metemneh was proved by the march to Gakdul; after reaching which Sir Herbert Stewart retraced his steps to Korti; where two days afterwards, about noon, a cloud of dust seen rising in the distance, almost to the welkin, announced the return of his column, looming large and darkly out of the mirage of the desert, in forms that were strange, distorted, and gigantic, after leaving twenty broken-down camels to die, abandoned in the awful waste.
Just as Stewart came, the sound of Scottish pipes on the Nile announced the arrival of the Black Watch in their boats off Korti. All round the world have our bagpipes sounded, but never before so far into the heart of the Dark Continent.
On Thursday, the 8th of January, the second advance through the desert began, and the natives looked upon the troops as doomed men. Three armies, larger and better equipped, had departed on the same errand to 'smash up' the Mahdi, but had been cut off nearly to a man, and their unburied skeletons were strewn all over the country.
All the officers in Sir Herbert Stewart's column were strangers to Malcolm Skene, but such is the influence of service together, camaraderie and companionship in danger and suffering, that even in these days of general muddle and 'scratch' formations, he felt already quite like an old friend with the staff and many others.
The pebble-strewn desert was glistening in the moonlight, when the column en route for Khartoum, viâ Gubat and Metemneh, marched off at two in the morning, and ever and anon the bugle rang out on the ambient air, sounding 'halt,' that the stragglers in the rear might close up, and then the long array continued to glide like a phantom army, or a mass of moving shadows, across the waste.