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. Tamai, once more; another siege of
Suakim: Gemaiza; Handub; Trinkitat, and Tokar - 1887.'
The river recalls the names; the mind at once brings up the face and
every trick of speech of some youth met for a few hours, maybe, in a
train on the way to Egypt of the old days. Both name and face had
utterly vanished from one's memory till then.
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