To die treacherously murdered on the Nile bank was a sorry fate for such a man. The road to the Soudan is strewn with the bones of many victims. But of them all it may be said, and especially of him: Their work lives after them, and their memory is nobly avenged.
CHAPTER XVI
THE NEW KHARTOUM
No one whose lot it has been to travel through the night on the plains of a tropical country can forget the amazing effect produced when the sun, with one great leap, as it seems, springs clear above the horizon. All in a moment the world’s face is altered. Its features are the same, yet utterly changed. The traveller, however hardened, can scarcely fail to wonder at the transformation. A journey to the Soudan to-day produces a very similar impression on one whose mind is full of the memories of the dark past. The din of battle has hardly ceased to echo, but the transformation is complete.
Even after Egypt, with all its fascinations, rich with the remains of ages of civilization, full to the brim of questions and problems deeply interesting to the student of history, archæology, politics, or economics, the Soudan, with its triple capital, Khartoum, Omdurman, Halfaya, comes upon you with a freshness and charm that are indescribable. Travelling by the ordinary methods, you may go from Alexandria to Khartoum in about six days. It is well worth while, even for anyone who has been up and down the whole length of Egypt, to take the whole journey in one piece. There is all the excitement of starting for a new country, and at the same time an opportunity to gather into a focus all the old impressions. Easily and smoothly you swing through the fertile cotton-fields of the Delta, and its populous cities and villages, prosperous but dirty, and at Cairo you settle down into a most comfortable sleeping-car for the night journey to Luxor.
Early next morning you are in the cane-fields of Upper Egypt, with the river close on one side and the desert on the other. At Luxor you must change on to the narrow gauge for Assouan, and there is time to refresh yourself with bath and breakfast, and to look across at the Plain of Thebes and the Valley of the Tombs of the Kings, or to ride a donkey out to Karnak. From Luxor to Assouan it is hot and dusty enough, and you are glad to rest there for the night. Next day you embark at Shellal, above the Dam, for Wadi Halfa, a voyage of some 200 miles. Coming down, the steamers do it in about twenty-four hours, but upstream it is a leisurely voyage of three days. There is plenty of time to see the interesting antiquities of Nubia, and, above all, the famous rock-hewn temple of Abu Simbel, the colossal statues of which are, perhaps, the most impressive of all the monuments of Egypt. It is, besides, a most beautiful reach of the river; the hills come down to the water in bold and rugged outlines, showing to perfection in the pure, dry, desert air.
The effect of the Dam is clearly seen as far as Korosko. First of all, at Shellal the boat is moored amid a grove of palm-trees, the temples of Philæ are knee-deep in water, and the Nubian villages look quaint enough as they stand on the edge of the desert, forlornly mourning their strip of cultivated land, most of which the greedy Reservoir has swallowed up. Probably a great part of these people will now migrate to Dongola, but the loss of the land—for which, indeed, compensation has been paid—is really a small matter to them. Hardly anywhere is an able-bodied male to be seen; all are away making their living as sailors or servants elsewhere, leaving the women and old men to keep their homes. These Nubian boatmen are a most happy and thrifty people, ready to work all day and dance all night, always to the accompaniment of a song.
The boundary between Egypt and the Soudan, settled by the Convention of 1899, runs along the twenty-second parallel; not far beyond this is the frontier town of Halfa. There is no mistaking the signs of British rule. The whole place is rigidly clean, an extraordinary contrast to the filth of the Egyptian villages. The streets are well laid out and scrupulously swept, and shady avenues of trees are springing up. But at present Halfa is not particularly interesting, except as the railway terminus of the Soudan. It is twenty-eight hours to Khartoum. Nothing can be more comfortable than the well-appointed sleeping-car train, which runs twice a week. Starting at eight in the evening, you strike right across the Nubian Desert, most desolate and forlorn of countries. The very stations have no names, but are known merely by their numbers.
In the morning you come to Abu Hamed, back to the Nile once more. Abu Hamed is just at the elbow of the river, where it turns to the west for its great circuit by Merowe and Dongola. Here was the scene of one of the stiffest fights in the Soudan Campaign, when General Hunter made his dash from Korti, in 1897, further down the Nile, to seize the point for which the new railway was making from Wadi Halfa, and here are the graves of Fitzclarence and Sidney, officers of the 10th Soudanese, who fell in the battle. Around this spot a ghostly legend hangs. It happened that the other white officers of the battalion were wounded on the same day, and the black troops marched back to their bivouac without any of their white leaders. A black regiment is always accompanied by its women on the march, and these have high notions of military honour. They would have nothing to do with men who dared to return alive from the field on which their officers had fallen. The warriors quailed before their wives, and serious trouble was brewing, till a black sergeant, who lay dying of his wounds, solved the difficulty. ‘Tell the women,’ he said, ‘that enough of us are dead to guard the spirits of the white men in the other world. I myself will mount the guard.’ There are innumerable witnesses to testify that he has kept his word. The lesson was not lost. It was the same battalion which later, at the Atbara, raced the Camerons for the enemy’s zareba, and, catching their Colonel as he ran in front of them, bore him heels foremost right through the camp, securely hedged by a living wall of bodies, because a second loss like that of Abu Hamed was not to be thought of.
From here onward the journey is full of interest. Berber is springing up again from its ruins; it even boasts two stations, but it has not an attractive look as a place to live in; there is as yet nothing more than the mud huts of the country, and it is the hottest place in the world. Next comes the Atbara River, though not the scene of the battle, for that was thirty miles upstream; then Shendi, of fiery memory, but now the Crewe of the Soudan, and finally, late at night, you step out of the train at Halfaya, the railway terminus. One glance at the sky will show you that you are really in the tropics. Canopus is shining fiercely in the east. Right overhead the giant Orion strides across the vault. Northwards the Great Bear stands like a huge note of interrogation in the sky, and just over the opposite horizon the Southern Cross is looming up.