Howard and Forsyth left Khartoum and strolled towards the plain where the Egyptian army lay. A town of tents, well pitched indeed, and dressed in parallel lines, and kept fairly clean—the English officers, though they had had all their work cut out, had at length taught the Egyptians that—but wanting in all those little embellishments which distinguish an English or French encampment, especially if it is at all permanent. No little flags to mark the companies; no extemporised miniature gardens; no neat frames to hang recently-cleaned accoutrements on. The sentries mooned up and down, carrying their rifles as if they were troublesome, heavy things, they longed to threw down, that they might put their hands in their pockets.
In one block of tents, however, which they passed through there was a great difference.
The sentry stood to his front and shouldered arms, as he saw Howard approach, smartly and with alacrity. The men were cleaning their arms as if they took pride in the task, not like paupers picking oakum; others were laughing loudly, or playing like schoolboys, and Harry noticed they were all black.
“These niggers look much finer fellows than the rest,” he observed.
“I should think they were!” replied Howard. “These are Nubians, and I wish we had more of them. They hate the Arabs, too, and that is another good thing.”
“What a lot of camels!” exclaimed Harry, as, passing over the top of a little hill, they came in sight of lines and lines of those ships of the desert, lying down, kneeling, standing; “and how strong they smell. One might fancy oneself in a menagerie.”
“Yes; Hercules himself could not have kept that quarter clean; the Augean stables were nothing to it. But look at these fellows we are coming to now. You seem to be a bit of a military critic; what do you think of them, and how do you like their mounts?”
They were now passing a small camp on the further side of the mound they had crossed. Three rows of tents, and aligned with each on the reverse flank a line of horses picketed—small, almost ponies, thin in the flank, wiry, but extremely rough. There had been no pains taken in grooming them evidently. As for the men loafing or swaggering about, those who were fully dressed were so stuck all over with arms—pistols, swords, daggers—that one wondered if they were suddenly attacked what weapon they would have recourse to first, and if they would make up their minds in time.
“I am no critic at all,” said Harry, laughing, “though every Englishman thinks he is a judge of horseflesh, and I fancy those might possess endurance, if not up to much weight. As for the men, they seem to fancy themselves more than the Egyptians; but a more villainous, blood-thirsty, thievish-looking set of scoundrels, it has never been my luck to see herded together.”
“You are not far out,” said Howard, laughing. “I should not like one of them to come across me if I were wounded and helpless, and had anything worth stealing about me, let me be friend or foe. But they are useful for scouting, and there are only three hundred of them. They are called Bashi-Bazooks, you know.”