THE EGYPTIAN SUDAN the boat, but in spite of all their efforts we ran on sand banks frequently, and the reefs gave the men a good deal of trouble. The captain took the opportunity of getting out- on a rock and of praying again, and then we began to make our way slowly through a reach of broken water, the boat grazing rocks with uncomfortable frequency. At length we passed into open water again, and we reached Kosha about one hour after sunset.

The next two or three days we spent in bringing the antiquities we had collected to the railway station and putting them into a truck, and at intervals we had time to look about the village. In the market there was the inevitable Greek, with a stock of tinned provisions and bottled fruits, and in a room which opened out of his shop the natives found both time and money to play games of chance. The postal official was an expert telegraphist whom I remembered seeing in the submarine cable office at Suez years before ; he did not like Kosha as a permanent place of residence, and was hoping to be transferred to Abu Hamed at an early date.

We found the natives of Kosha greatly disturbed by the recent decision of the Government to take up the Halfa-Kerma line south of Kosha, and to discontinue the carriage of goods to Halfa. The district of Sukkot has always been famous for its dates, and since the opening of the railway to Kerma in 1896, the trade in this commodity has increased greatly. The natives collected the dates from the villages, and then packed them in large bags which they were able to send by rail to Haifa for a few piastres per hundredweight. But as Lord Cromer has told us, the Halfa-Kerma line was worked for years at a loss, and in 1903 the authorities decided to take up the rails from Kosha to Kerma, which were in good condition, and use them in the construction of the new line between Atbara and the Red Sea. The section of the line between Haifa and Kosha was declared to be unsafe, and as the existing traffic did not justify its reconstruction it was further decided to discontinue mercantile traffic. The result was that many hundreds of bags of dates, each weighing three hundredweight, were lying by the line at Kosha when we were there, and the merchants were in despair of ever disposing of them with benefit to themselves. Camel transport to Haifa was very expensive, i.e., about three shillings per hundredweight, and the 470 1