'What is the name of the next station out from
here?'
'Station Number One,' said a ghost.
'And the next?'
'Station Number Two, and so on to Eight, I think.'
'And wasn't it worth while to name even one of these stations from
some man, living or dead, who had something to do with making the line?'
'Well, they didn't, anyhow,' said another ghost. 'I suppose they didn't
think it worth while. Why? What do you think?'
'I think, I replied, 'it is the sort of snobbery that nations go to
Hades for.'
Her headlight showed at last, an immense distance off; the economic
electrics were turned up, the ghosts vanished, the dragomans of the
various steamers flowed forward in beautiful garments to meet their
passengers who had booked passages in the Cook boats, and the Khartoum
train decanted a joyous collection of folk, all decorated with horns,
hoofs, skins, hides, knives, and assegais, which they had been buying at
Omdurman. And when the porters laid hold upon their bristling bundles,
it was like MacNeill's Zareba without the camels.
Two young men in tarboushes were the only people who had no part in the
riot. Said one of them to the other:
'Hullo?'
Said the other: 'Hullo!'
They grunted together for a while. Then one pleasantly:
'Oh, I'm sorry for that! I thought I was going to have you under me
for a bit. Then you'll use the rest-house there?'
'I suppose so,' said the other. 'Do you happen to know if the roof's
on?'
Here a woman wailed aloud for her dervish spear which had gone adrift,
and I shall never know, except from the back pages of the Soudan
Almanack, what state that rest-house there is in.
The Soudan Administration, by the little I heard, is a queer service. It
extends itself in silence from the edges of Abyssinia to the swamps of
the Equator at an average pressure of one white man to several thousand
square miles. It legislates according to the custom of the tribe where
possible, and on the common sense of the moment when there is no
precedent. It is recruited almost wholly from the army, armed chiefly
with binoculars, and enjoys a death-rate a little lower than its own
reputation. It is said to be the only service in which a man taking
leave is explicitly recommended to get out of the country and rest
himself that he may return the more fit to his job. A high standard of
intelligence is required, and lapses are not overlooked. For instance,
one man on leave in London took the wrong train from Boulogne, and
instead of going to Paris, which, of course, he had intended, found
himself at a station called Kirk Kilissie or Adrianople West, where he
stayed for some weeks. It was a mistake that might have happened to any
one on a dark night after a stormy passage, but the authorities would
not believe it, and when I left Egypt were busily engaged in boiling
him in hot oil. They are grossly respectable in the Soudan now.
Long and long ago, before even the Philippines were taken, a friend of
mine was reprimanded by a British Member of Parliament, first for the
sin of blood-guiltiness because he was by trade a soldier, next for
murder because he had fought in great battles, and lastly, and most
important, because he and his fellow-braves had saddled the British
taxpayer with the expense of the Soudan. My friend explained that all
the Soudan had ever cost the British taxpayer was the price of about one
dozen of regulation Union Jacks - one for each province. 'That,' said the
M.P. triumphantly, 'is all it will ever be worth.' He went on to justify
himself, and the Soudan went on also. To-day it has taken its place as
one of those accepted miracles which are worked without heat or
headlines by men who do the job nearest their hand and seldom fuss about
their reputations.
But less than sixteen years ago the length and breadth of it was one
crazy hell of murder, torture, and lust, where every man who had a sword
used it till he met a stronger and became a slave. It was - men say who
remember it - a hysteria of blood and fanaticism; and precisely as an
hysterical woman is called to her senses by a dash of cold water, so at
the battle of Omdurman the land was reduced to sanity by applied death
on such a scale as the murderers and the torturers at their most
unbridled could scarcely have dreamed. In a day and a night all who had
power and authority were wiped out and put under till, as the old song
says, no chief remained to ask after any follower. They had all charged
into Paradise. The people who were left looked for renewed massacres of
the sort they had been accustomed to, and when these did not come, they
said helplessly: 'We have nothing. We are nothing. Will you sell us into
slavery among the Egyptians?' The men who remember the old days of the
Reconstruction - which deserves an epic of its own - say that there was
nothing left to build on, not even wreckage. Knowledge, decency,
kinship, property, tide, sense of possession had all gone. The people
were told they were to sit still and obey orders; and they stared and
fumbled like dazed crowds after an explosion. Bit by bit, however, they
were fed and watered and marshalled into some sort of order; set to
tasks they never dreamed to see the end of; and, almost by physical
force, pushed and hauled along the ways of mere life. They came to
understand presently that they might reap what they had sown, and that
man, even a woman, might walk for a day's journey with two goats and a
native bedstead and live undespoiled.
