Some
Reed Of The Bank Revealed Itself By Reflection, Black On Silver; Arched
Wings Flapped And Jarred The Still Water To Splintered Glass; The Desert
Ridge Turned To Topaz, And The Four Figures Stood Clear, Yet Without
Shadowing, From Their Background.
The stronger light flooded them red
from head to foot, and they became alive - as horridly and tensely yet
blindly alive as pinioned men in the death-chair before the current is
switched on.
One felt that if by any miracle the dawn could be delayed a
second longer, they would tear themselves free, and leap forth to
heaven knows what sort of vengeance. But that instant the full sun
pinned them in their places - nothing more than statues slashed with
light and shadow - and another day got to work.
A few yards to the left of the great images, close to the statue of an
Egyptian princess, whose face was the very face of 'She,' there was a
marble slab over the grave of an English officer killed in a fight
against dervishes nearly a generation ago.
From Abu Simbel to Wady Halfa the river, escaped from the domination of
the Pharaohs, begins to talk about dead white men. Thirty years ago,
young English officers in India lied and intrigued furiously that they
might be attached to expeditions whose bases were sometimes at Suakim,
sometimes quite in the desert air, but all of whose deeds are now quite
forgotten. Occasionally the dragoman, waving a smooth hand east or
south-easterly, will speak of some fight. Then every one murmurs: 'Oh
yes. That was Gordon, of course,' or 'Was that before or after
Omdurman?' But the river is much more precise. As the boat quarters
the falling stream like a puzzled hound, all the old names spurt
up again under the paddle-wheels - 'Hicks' army - Val Baker - El
Teb - Tokar - Tamai - Tamanieb and Osman Digna!' Her head swings round
for another slant: 'We cannot land English or Indian troops: if
consulted, recommend abandonment of the Soudan within certain limits.'
That was my Lord Granville chirruping to the advisers of His Highness
the Khedive, and the sentence comes back as crisp as when it first
shocked one in '84. Next - here is a long reach between flooded palm
trees - next, of course, comes Gordon - and a delightfully mad Irish
war correspondent who was locked up with him in Khartoum.
Gordon - Eighty-four - Eighty-five - the Suakim-Berber Railway really begun
and quite as really abandoned. Korti - Abu Klea - the Desert Column - a
steamer called the Safieh not the Condor, which rescued two other
steamers wrecked on their way back from a Khartoum in the red hands of
the Mahdi of those days. Then - the smooth glide over deep water
continues - another Suakim expedition with a great deal of Osman Digna
and renewed attempts to build the Suakim-Berber Railway. 'Hashin,' say
the paddle-wheels, slowing all of a sudden - 'MacNeill's Zareba - the 15th
Sikhs and another native regiment - Osman Digna in great pride and power,
and Wady Halfa a frontier town.
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