O EGYPT AND THE SOUDAN.

mounted infantry. The baggage camels were arranged in column

with from twenty to thirty marching abreast, and with fifty yards

interval between each troop. The guards in front and the mounted

infantry in rear were in close column of companies ready to dismount and form a square at a moment's notice. Lord Wolseley inspected

the whole force, and the little party of cavalry scouts, under Major

Kitchener, with six Arab guides, moved off in front. A quarter

of an hour later the general gave the order, and the great column

got in motion, striking straight across the undulating plain towards

the distant horizon, the two thousand camels with their necks

stretched out, and their long legs moving slowly in apparently

mechanical strides, until the rising dust enveloped them and all

that followed in a gray mist, and finally hid from view the whole

column, which, broad as was its face, extended for a mile in length. No natives accompanied the column, except the guides who went

with the hussar scouts, a few others with a guard of mounted

infantry in the rear, a few servants from Cairo, and the camel-

drivers.

The first regular wells at which the column would arrive were

at Hambok, about forty miles distant, and they are merely holes dug in the sand and deepened as the subterranean waters fall,

until either the sides cave in, or the whole excavation is obliterated by the rush of water down the wady during the rainy season. The water is mostly drawn from these and all similar wells in the Bayuda by means of rough skin bags, and is then poured into

small earthen cisterns made on the surface, at which camels, sheep,

and horses are watered; these wells are rarely more than twenty

to twenty-five feet deep.

Near this point, at thirty-eight miles from Ambukol, the wady,

which has hitherto been flat and sandy, with very gently sloping

sides, becomes much broken, small metamorphic ridges, hills, and

lava-like mounds close in, showing that the belt of metamorphic

rock interveninof between the lower Nubian sandstone and the

extensive granite rocks is beinor traversed. The hills assume

curious forms : some, of black basalt, are almost perfectly conical,

whilst the rock of which they are composed is so magnetic as