236 EGYPT AND THE SOUDAN.

secured. Not only did the intense heat and the dust or fine sand exhaust the men, but the stench of the dead bodies of men and camels that pervaded the camp was sickening-. The corpses of our own slain were buried, but it was not possible to bury those of the Arabs, which lay at a distance and in various directions. The shifting sand, too, would not for any length of time cover a dead camel unless at a very great depth, and sometimes in a few hours the wind would lay bare portions of putrefying carcasses, to which earth would have acted as a deodorizer and resolvent, but on which the sand had no effect except to conceal the rotting mass until it was dried to a hard mummy. Suakim, with its Arab graveyard, its collection of offal and decaying rubbish, and its dirty streets, was bad enough; the camel depot, with its multitude of groaning beasts crowded together and giving forth their own peculiar stench, was not pleasant; but the camp presented almost inevitable difficulties in maintaining a sanitary condition. It was not till the carcasses of the camels that had died or were slain by the enemy were hauled for some distance beyond the camp in the direction of the wind, and there buried, that the air was cleared of what seemed to threaten to add pestilence to the fever and exhaustion that came of constant exertion, intense and almost unmitigated heat, broken rest, anxiety, and the hardships of camp life in a climate where the work of forming a line of railway, advancing on a savage and unscrupulous foe, and fighting a series of battles, was to be achieved by a force of between 8000 and 9000 men of various arms, aided by about 2000 drivers, labourers, grass-cutters, and others.

On the night of the nth March a few shots were heard along the front, a circumstance so common that the men who were not in that direction turned in as usual. Only for a short time, however, for there was soon a sound of rushing feet, a hoarse cry to turn out, the sound of bugles, and the pickets coming in, while flashes of the rifles and the whisk of the bullets went all along the line, soon to become a fast and continuous firing, amidst which the guns of the Dolphin boomed, their shots going into the desert, and the electric light flashed out, throwing all the tents, the groups of men at their posts, and the various objects of the camp into momentary definition; while the rifle bullets were cutting the ground, and sentries, returning patrols, and men in opposing directions were in extreme danger of shooting each other in mistake for the enemy, both before and after the sudden illumination. The enemy had made a general assault all round, and the ordnance store had been marked for special attack while the skirmish was going on. That attack was led by a gigantic negro who had formerly been a porter at the wharf at Suakim, and was now under the name of Abdul Ahad ("Abdul the Lion"), standard-bearer to Osman Digma. The locality of the ordnance store and depot was well known to the enemy, and they were not slow to perceive that if it could be destroyed our troops would be