Chapter 2 - Page 2

across a rock-ridge half a
mile upstream. It was as though the brown weight of the river would
drive the white men back to their own country. The indescribable scent
of Nile mud in the air told that the stream was falling and the next few
miles would be no light thing for the whale-boats to overpass. The desert
ran down almost to the banks, where, among gray, red, and black
hillocks, a camel-corps was encamped. No man dared even for a day lose
touch of the slow-moving boats; there had been no fighting for weeks
past, and throughout all that time the Nile had never spared them. Rapid
had followed rapid, rock rock, and island-group island-group, till the
rank and file had long since lost all count of direction and very nearly of
time. They were moving somewhere, they did not know why, to do
something, they did not know what. Before them lay the Nile, and at the
other end of it was one Gordon, fighting for the dear life, in a town called
Khartoum. There were columns of British troops in the desert, or in one
of the many deserts; there were yet more columns waiting to embark on
the river; there were fresh drafts waiting at Assioot and Assuan; there
were lies and rumours running over the face of the hopeless land from
Suakin to the Sixth Cataract, and men supposed generally that there
must be some one in authority to direct the general scheme of the many
movements. The duty of that particular river-column was to keep the
whale-boats afloat in the water, to avoid trampling on the villagers' crops
when the gangs 'tracked' the boats with lines thrown from midstream, to
get as much sleep and food as was possible, and, above all, to press on
without delay in the teeth of the churning Nile.

With the soldiers sweated and toiled the correspondents of the
newspapers, and they were almost as ignorant as their companions. But
it was above all things necessary that England at breakfast should be
amused and thrilled and interested, whether Gordon lived or died, or
half the British army went to pieces in the sands. The Soudan campaign
was a picturesque one, and lent itself to vivid word-painting. Now and
again a 'Special' managed to get slain,--which was not altogether a
disadvantage to the paper that employed him,--and more often the
hand-to-hand nature of the fighting allowed of miraculous escapes which
were worth telegraphing home at eighteenpence the word. There were
many correspondents with many corps and columns,--from the veterans
who had followed on the heels of the cavalry that occupied Cairo in '82,
what time Arabi Pasha called himself king, who had seen the first
miserable work round Suakin when the sentries were cut up nightly and
the scrub swarmed with spears, to youngsters jerked into the business at
the end of a