34 EGYPT AND THE SOUDAN.

Arabs were scarcely out of sight when Barrow, who, with his hussars, had kept in check a large body of the enemy, rode up.

His horses were too tired and too done up with the march and through want of water to be able to pursue the enemy or to act efficiently as cavalry; but he was sent at once to occupy the wells.

The situation was critical and difficult, but there was no time for hesitation, nor was Sir Herbert Stewart the man to hesitate in making a bold decision. The Mahdi's forces at Metammeh were preparing for an attack, and had, it was understood, formed an intrenched camp there. Though the attempt to overwhelm the British force at Abu-Klea had failed, the experience of El Teb and Tamanieb went to show that the battle would not be regarded as final, and that the enemy would renew the conflict and fight even more desperately. The serious question was, whether with such a handful of troops a general could determine to march to Metammeh, and storm an intrenched position defended by perhaps ten thousand of the Mahdi's followers, many of them armed with rifles and possessing at least three guns. Of the two thousand men who left Korti only about fifteen hundred fought at Abu-Klea, the others having been left either in hospital or to guard the wells at Hanbok, El Howeiyat, and Gakdul. Of the fifteen hundred, a hundred and fifty were hors de combat, and when a guard was told oft' to hold the hospital and wells at Abu-Klea and the wells at Shebacat, the effective force which would have to meet the enemy at Metammeh would not much exceed a thousand men. Would he fall back on Abu-Klea and wait for reinforcements, or push on in the direction which would lead him to strike the Nile above or below the enemy's position, and there wait for the arrival of General Earle's river column .-That the advance would be against great odds was obvious enough, and though we had been victorious at Abu-Klea we had suffered serious loss. Our success had been dearly purchased. The death of Lieutenant-colonel Fred Burnaby was not perhaps the chief calamity of that short and bloody struggle, but it was the most illustrative of the kind of price we might have to pay