THE EGYPTIAN SUDAN trucks, uncovered, and with a flap-door on each side, three waggons of the kind I was in, and a brake van ; the whole was drawn by a mighty engine, which must have weighed forty or sixty tons. The contents of the train were miscellaneous. Several trucks were filled with sleepers for the continuation of the railway from the Atbara to Khartum, and above these were stacked piles of small boxes full of light merchandise of all kinds. Behind the trucks of sleepers came a number of trucks of small coal, and upon this were camped numbers of soldiers, both Egyptians and blacks, native merchants, Greeks, Italians, and several Sudani women with their families. By the help of a few sleepers and odd boxes and their own loose garments, many of the black women had made for themselves shelters from the night wind, and soon after the train steamed out of HalfSL they kindled little fires in flat earthenware pans and cooked their suppers. Each woman had her kulla, i.e., native water-bottle made of porous earthenware, which had been filled before we left Haifa, and many of them had brought their stone dhurra grinders with them. They seemed very contented, and chattered for hours, in fact far into the night, and shared their dates with each other in, apparently, sincere good fellowship.

Just before we left Haifa a young Royal Engineer attached to the railway entered the train, and he came and shared the waggon with me ; he had *' worked " the train which had arrived that morning in Haifa from No. 6 Station, and was returning there. He was a very intelligent man, and naturally knew every mile of the line ; he was one of the first Englishmen to drive an engine on the Haifa-Abu Hamed Railway, and told me many an interesting story of the difficulties v/hich beset pioneer railway engineering in the Sudan. His knowledge of the peculiarities of every engine in and out of work was wonderful, and to him they were certainly living beings, with likes, and dislikes, and caprices just like human folk. Apparently he had been ordered to " keep an eye" on the driver of our train, and, whether talking or eating, his ears were always listening to the beat of the engine, which in some way told him what the driver and the stoker were doing. For the first hour or two nothing happened to disturb him seriously, but so soon as we had left Haifa some twenty miles behind us. and were well out in the desert, a strong wind began to blow, and 242