WARS OF THE NINETIES. 46 the army from the Royal Military College at Kingston,in Canada, had spent a few years in England training as a railway specialist. His colleagues had none of them been engaged in any regular railway work till they were appointed to the construction corps of the new Soudan line.

in these deserts that both transportand storage mean continual loss, which has to be made up by new supplies.

Though it anticipates events yet to berelated in our story of the campaign,it maybe well to noteheresomepointsfromLordCromer's account of this remarkable feat of engineering,given in his annualreporton the condition of Egypt. At midsummer, 1S97, this was the situation on the Upper Nile. The advanced garrisons ol the Dongola province, under the command of GeneralHunter (the Colonel Hunter of the 1896 campaign), were at Meroweand Debbeh. Posts of friendly Arabs had been established at some of the wells on the desert routes to the southward, and the cavalry and Camel Corps had madefrequent reconnaissances along these lines. The only occasion on which theDervishes were met with was in a reconnaissance made by Captain Peyton with a part}- of Egyptian cavalry, through the Shukuk Pass towards Abu Hamed. Not far from the scene of the battleof Kirbekan,fought by the river column in Peyton was attacked by a party of Dervishes, who had most likely come from Abu Hamed. He beat them off, but himself receiveda serious wound from a spear in the hand-to-hand skirmish. The Egyptians stood gallantly bi their white officer, and killed several of the Dervishes, who after a few minutes fled up the pass.

"The country traversed," he says, "is chiefly a sandy plain with rocks rising out of it in places. The line rises gradually to No. 6 station, which is 1,600 feet above Wady Haifa, and then falls gradually to Abu Hamed. The system employed in laying the line was briefly as follows:— In the first place, a reconnaissance was madeby officers mounted on camels to obtain a general idea of the surroundingcountry, and settle roughly the direction the line should follow. The difficulty of this portion of the work was enha-nced by the fact that between miles 40 and 126 the reconnoitring parties were not allowed to proceed more than ten miles in front of the railhead escort,owing to the presence of Dervishes at Abu Hamed, and the danger of being cut off by raiding parties. Itwas, therefore,not always easy tolay out the line to the best advantage. " When the line was laidup to mile 126, Abu Hamed was captured,and a reconnaissance was at once made from the railhead to that place. This was followedby a more carefulsurvey, and the direction which the line should follow was then definitely decided. About five miles behind the survey parties came the working parties, 1,200 strong, for making the embankments. Two miles behind these followed the platelaying parties, consisting of 550 men for laving the permanent way. These plate-layers were, almost without exception, trainedby their own officers. Half a mile behind the platelayers came a gang of 400 men, whose duties were to lift, straighten, and ballast the line. A milebehind these followeda secondlifting party of 400 men, to put on the finishing touches. The material trains ran up to the head of the line,and then moved on slowly as the line was The Jaalin tribe, whose country lay along the river from Berber to beyond Metemneh, but most of whom were near the latter place,had sent in messages assuring the Sirdar that when he advanced they- would declare against the Mahdists and aci with the Government troops.

Unfortunately, they took action before the Egyptian army was near enough to give them any help or protection. In February the Khalifa had drawn into Khartoum several of the outlying garrisons of Kordofan. In Junehe sent a strongforce under a chief of his own tribe,theEmir Mahmoud, to occupy Metemneh. There had been a Dervish post there for years. In 1S85 the Jaalin had defended the place against the British, after the defeat of their spearmen at Abu Kle'a. Since the loss of Dongola it had been garrisoned by a small force, which, with an outpost at the wells of Abu Klea, watched the desert route by which the British had once come, and by which it was supposed they might come again.

made, the material being unloaded a few yards at a time, spiked down, and then roughly straightened to allow the train to pass overit." It must be addedthatthe officers who planned and carried out the work,and taught their men how to do it, were young lieutenants of our Royal Engineers. The oldest of them was not thirty. Their chief was a Canadian officer, Lieutenant Girouard, who, alter passing into .Mahmoud, the new .Mahdist governor, a young man of about thirty, tall,athletic,and with a great reputation as a soldier. He had