Chapter 24

THE RIDDLE OF EMPIRE

At Halfa one feels the first breath of a frontier. Here the Egyptian
Government retires into the background, and even the Cook steamer does not
draw up in the exact centre of the postcard. At the telegraph-office, too,
there are traces, diluted but quite recognisable, of military
administration. Nor does the town, in any way or place whatever,
smell--which is proof that it is not looked after on popular lines. There
is nothing to see in it any more than there is in Hulk C. 60, late of her
Majesty's troopship _Himalaya_, now a coal-hulk in the Hamoaze at
Plymouth. A river front, a narrow terraced river-walk of semi-oriental
houses, barracks, a mosque, and half-a-dozen streets at right angles, the
Desert racing up to the end of each, make all the town. A mile or so up
stream under palm trees are bungalows of what must have been cantonments,
some machinery repair-shops, and odds and ends of railway track. It is all
as paltry a collection of whitewashed houses, pitiful gardens, dead walls,
and trodden waste spaces as one would wish to find anywhere; and every bit
of it quivers with the remembered life of armies and river-fleets, as the
finger-bowl rings when the rubbing finger is lifted. The most unlikely men
have done time there; stores by the thousand ton have been rolled and
pushed and hauled up the banks by tens of thousands of scattered hands;
hospitals have pitched themselves there, expanded enormously, shrivelled
up and drifted away with the drifting regiments; railway sidings by the
mile have been laid down and ripped up again, as need changed, and utterly
wiped out by the sands.

Halfa has been the rail-head, Army Headquarters, and hub of the
universe--the one place where a man could make sure of buying tobacco
and sardines, or could hope for letters for himself and medical
attendance for his friend. Now she is a little shrunken shell of a town
without a proper hotel, where tourists hurry up from the river to buy
complete sets of Soudan stamps at the Post Office.

I went for a purposeless walk from one end of the place to the other,
and found a crowd of native boys playing football on what might have
been a parade-ground of old days.

'And what school is that?' I asked in English of a small, eager youth.

'Madrissah,' said he most intelligently, which being translated means
just 'school.'

'Yes, but _what_ school?'

'Yes, Madrissah, school, sir,' and he tagged after to see what else the
imbecile wanted.

A line of railway track, that must have fed big workshops in its time,
led me between big-roomed houses and offices labelled departmentally,
with here and there a clerk at work. I was directed and re-directed by
polite Egyptian officials (I