For Fortune and Glory: A Story of the Soudan War

by Lewis Hough

But before putting it on he bound his head with a strip of cotton torn off the garment of the Arab at his feet, for the cut on the scalp was bleeding freely. Then, feeling very thirsty, he took the man’s water-bottle, but it was empty. So, picking up his sword, he moved over to the other dead Arab and tried his, and with better success; there was a refreshing draught in it, which Harry was thus able to benefit by without infringing on his own supply. Then he considered that he must get out of sight somewhere before the Arabs returned, which they were sure to do, to look after their missing friends. He had now no horse, and to make his way on foot across the open plain by daylight was to ensure being seen by the returning horsemen and cut off.

The best place to hide in would surely be the wood, where he felt certain that there were no more Arabs, or they would have come out to join in the chevy. He would lie there till nightfall, and then endeavour to make his way to the column, though he did not feel like taking a long walk just at present.

As he was going up the hill, however, he saw the Arab with the broken leg lying helpless. The string which held his water-bottle had broken, and the gourd lay beyond his reach. The man glared like a wild beast when Harry picked it up, and clutched at his waist-band, but there was no weapon in it.

“Don’t fear me,” said Harry in Arabic, holding out the gourd, which the other snatched viciously; “I am an Englishman, and the English never hit a foe when he is down, unless he is very obstinate and unreasonable, and insists on biting or kicking.”

But the wounded man made no reply. It is to be feared that he only thought either that the speaker was a great liar, or else that his countrymen were great fools. It was evident that, so far from being touched, he would be the first to betray the secret of Harry’s hiding-place to his returning friends if he knew it. So as Harry did not like to shoot him through the head, or draw his sword across his throat, he made a détour as if going across the desert, and did not commence the ascent until he was out of the other’s sight. It was not very steep or very high, but Harry had some difficulty in getting up it. He felt very weak, giddy, and queer, and had hardly got to the wood, and sunk down under the shade of trees behind a big black boulder, than he lost consciousness, for he had bled more than he knew for, and it was that which turned him faint.

How long he lay without consciousness he did not know; and I daresay that you have noticed in story-books that people never do know. Indeed, it would take a very methodical person to look at his watch just as he was going off in a swoon, and refer to it again as he came to. Harry Forsyth certainly never looked at his watch, but he snatched his water-bottle, for one effect of loss of blood is to cause intense thirst. A quantity of liquid being taken out of the body. Nature seems to point out in this way that the loss should be supplied; you know she is said to abhor a vacuum. If he had had all his senses about him, he would merely have taken a sup and held it in his mouth some time before swallowing it; but he was half dazed, and did not know where he was, and he yielded to the instinct of thirst and took a long, deep draught. For the present it was the best thing he could have done, for the effect was that he sank into a sound restoring sleep, which must have lasted many hours, for when he woke again the night was far advanced, and there were streaks of dawn in the east, and it was quite two hours to sunset when he had begun his nap. The wound in his head smarted, but otherwise he felt stronger and more refreshed, only hungry. He had crammed some biscuits into his kharkee jacket the day before, and these he ate, washing them down with what remained in the water-bottle, which he emptied without much compunction, as he reckoned that he would easily strike the trail of the column and come up with it in a short time.

They had reckoned before he left that it was three hours’ march at the longest to the wells within sight of El Obeid, where they were to halt for the night, and he thought that he surely ought to be able to walk, alone and unencumbered, at least as fast again as the square moved, and he had little fear of not being in time for the attack. The place could hardly be carried by a coup de main; they would have to breach the walls with artillery first. Of course he might be cut off on his road; that was a risk which could not be helped or avoided.

Directly he could see his way, he retraced his steps down the hill, and went round the base to the side where he had had the skirmish; but he did not look to see whether the dead Arabs had been buried by their comrades, or to inquire after the welfare of his friend, the enemy with the broken leg. No, he stole along that part as quietly as he could.

The orange, purple, violet, old gold flashes shone wider and higher, but the only way in which Harry heeded them was by keeping the point, at which it was evident from the intensity of glory that the sun would rise, at his back, for he knew that El Obeid lay due west of his present position. It was true that he had a compass attached to his watch chain, but for some unknown cause the thing had struck work a fortnight back, and now the black half, which ought always to have turned to the north, perversely remained where you choose to place it. But, after all, the sun in the morning and evening, and the polar star at night, will put you somewhere in the right direction, when you can see them.

As for hitting off the exact track by which he had come on leaving the column, he could no more do that than on the sea, for there were no marks to guide the eye, and the surface of the plain was the same as water. One dead camel’s skeleton is uncommonly like another, and they lay about in various directions, showing that caravans converged to or diverged from El Obeid by different routes. When the sun burst forth with all that inconceivable grandeur which drives artists who visit the country to despair, and causes untravelled gazers on their pictures to accuse them of exaggeration, when their efforts have as a fact fallen far short of the reality, Harry’s eyes scanned the horizon in every direction for an enemy, but he was alone on the sandy expanse.