WAR TRANSPORT AT NAGH HAMADl full of stores and war material in the land of the Pharaohs. The trucks were of many shapes and sizes, and the locomotives of various powers and of all kinds of build, but it was clear from the way in which they were worked from station to station that their movements were directed by one all- compelling master-mind, which spared neither man nor machine until its commands had been performed. The river was full of craft, some drifting down empty, and others sailing up heavily laden with wooden sleepers and rails for the Sudan Military Railway, and machinery of all kinds ; and their crews worked by day and by night. The scene at Nagh Hamadi was an extraordinary one. At the place where the line stopped short many scores of boats were being loaded and unloaded, and the river-bank was lined with workmen and idlers who never seemed to sleep at all. By day the air rang with the clang of the hammers and the shouts of the men who were working on the iron bridge which was to carry the railway over to the east bank of the river, the sing-song of the natives who were unloading trucks and loading boats, the whistlings of locomotives, and the crashes of trucks being shunted, the hooting of steamers, the braying of donkeys, and the hundred-andone noises which are the accompaniments of Egyptians engaged in manual labour. At night the work on the bridge ceased, and the river-bank was lit up by the glare of electric lamps and by innumerable fires, round which squatted groups of men cooking their food, eating, smoking, and talking and laughing to their heart's content. Every now and then the shriek of a locomotive announced the arrival of another train, and hundreds of human forms sprang up, as if by magic, and transferred the contents of the trucks to the places most convenient for stowing them in the boats.

The journey up the river from Nagh Hamadi to Aswan was uneventful, but the views which the passengers on the steamers obtained of the country on each bank of the Nile were of the greatest interest, for from the upper deck it was possible to see, near the foot of the mountains, villages, the existence of which is unsuspected by the ordinary traveller in Egypt. The Nile flood of 1897 was a fairly good one, and its waters covered the fields completely, and turned into islands many villages which stood VOL. I. 65 F