“Yes,” responded the major. “I wonder whether they went through the same performance when the Mahdi’s army arrived.”
“But they showed fight, and he took the place by storm, did he not, sir?”
“I really do not know; a spy said so. But the place does not look knocked about at all, and the people seem very jolly. I should not be surprised if the whole thing were a farce, and Tokar had not been besieged or taken at all.”
“Then you do not think they are genuine in their welcome, sir?”
“I do not say that; these people have shops of a sort, I believe, and a customer is a customer all the world over.”
The troops bivouacked outside Tokar, where nothing further occurred of any interest, and shortly afterwards they tramped back to the wells at El Teb, and so to Trinkitat, where they were re-embarked as quickly as might be, and steamed round to Suakim, which now became the base of operations.
And soon Trinkitat was entirely abandoned, and since no natives lived there (how could they when they had no fresh water?) the place ceased to be a place at all in any rational sense of the word.
You may have heard the old explanation of how a cannon is made: “you take a hole, and pour a lot of melted iron round it.” Well, Trinkitat was a hole, and the English store-houses tents, soldiers, horses, camels were poured round it, and when they were withdrawn, nothing but the hole remained. But Suakim was a considerable place, built of coral too, and very interesting in its way to some people. And what was of more consequence, there were many good wells close by, from which water could be obtained all the year round.
Suakim itself, as has been explained before, is built on an island, but the British camp was on the mainland, within the circuit of earthworks which protected the town and harbour. It was on the eighth of March that the First Blankshire were landed at this camp. The look of the houses in the town disappointed some of them now they were closer.
“They don’t look like coral at all,” said Tom Strachan. “If I had not been told I should have thought they were the ordinary sun-dried brick affairs whitewashed.”