''Pon my soul, Allan Graham,' said Carslogie, 'considering how these rascals treated our wounded at Kassassin, your humanity, to say the least of it, seems to me to be a little misplaced.'
'Perhaps; but I cannot help it. I feel a little tender-hearted just now,' said Allan, with a smile, as the wounded Bedouin—of whom he had not seen the last—was borne away.
The pipes struck up, and once more the columns began a ten-miles' march to Mahsameh. The Gordon Highlanders were in advance, the Camerons next, then came the Highland Light Infantry, and then the Black Watch, all toiling through the soft, deep sand. These splendid regiments were all marching in massed columns, at one pace interval, the cavalry moving with them collaterally on one flank, and the artillery on the other, clattering along, with spunges, buckets, spare wheels, and forge waggons—all forming a grand, impressive spectacle in the midst of the wide Egyptian desert.
To Scottish soldiers, who are usually so well-grounded in their Bible history, the soil they were treading, if the toil made it disgusting on one hand, memory made it full of deep interest on the other. They knew that they were already in, or were approaching, the Land of Goshen, where, by the tasks they had conned at school and those which their ministers superintended, they were aware that they were nigh unto the place where Jacob dwelt of old, that he might be near to Joseph, who lived at Pharaoh's court; near to the place where father and son met, and where we still find Rameses, which was built by the Israelites in the days of their bondage; and, as our soldiers marched on, some there were who recalled these things to each other, as their minds went back to the village kirk, whose bells awoke the echoes of green and lonely glens, and to the firesides of their fathers, when expounding on these things on Saturday night, when the 'big ha' Bible' was produced; and, though they might yawn wearily over such matters at home, these scriptural names and localities had a very different effect upon them now.
CHAPTER XX.
THE MARCH THROUGH GOSHEN.
On, and on, and on, through the same kind of Egyptian landscape—tame, barren, and insipid—so terribly vapid and flatly horrid, when compared with the Salvatoresque hills and glens of their native land—the naked plain, bounded by occasional hillocks at vast distances—the toilsome march of the Highlanders continued. Yet there are luxuriant plains in some parts of the Land of Goshen.
Sometimes date-trees were seen, with trunks bare and slender, or mud-walled wigwams on the causeways; but it is a land that, with all its vast antiquity and religious associations, of which no poet has ever sung. 'What, indeed, could an Egyptian sing on the reed of Gesner or Theocritus?' asks Volney. 'He sees neither limpid streams, nor verdant lawns, nor solitary caves; and is equally a stranger to valleys, mountain-sides, and impending rocks.' Miss Martineau is almost the only traveller who claims for Egypt the attributes of the picturesque and varied in beauty!
And there were incessant swarms of scorpions, gnats, and more especially of flies—one of the many plagues of Egypt—which were so numerous that it was impossible to eat the dry ration biscuits without the chance of swallowing these pests also.
More than once, on the summit of a sandy hillock, there would appear, sharply defined against the clear blue sky, the picturesque figure of a mounted Bedouin, with his white burnous floating about him, a tall, reed-like spear, or a long musket slung by his side—a man unchanged in aspect or ideas from his nomadic forefathers, who saw the mailed Crusaders toiling on their way to Jerusalem—gazing with stolid wonder at the marching columns in a costume so strange, with bare knees, white sporrans, and kilts of dark-green tartan waving at every step; while on the hot and breathless air there was borne towards him the hoarse and shrill music of the pipes—the same wild music that, eighty years before, woke the echoes of the Pyramids and of the streets of Grand Cairo.