CHAPTER IV.

By THE Wayv—From Catro To DAKHALA.

TEN days from London to the junction of the Atbara with the Nile: so far from England and yet so near.

By-and-by, no doubt, the Brindisi mail, speeding in connection with the Khartoum express, will make the run in seven or eight days. From England to Port Said is now but a matter of four days by the new Peninsular and Oriental service. It took me six days from Cairo to reach Dakhala. The officials prefer to know the place as “ Atbara Camp.” There is no absolute rule for the bestowal of proper names, or at least no practice one need care about in the Soudan, so I prefer to dub the locality by its native title of Dakhala, or Dakhelha. It saves a word in telegraphing, and there is more fitness in calling that dusty, dirty enclosure by the less euphonious name.

One could not but note what a wondrous change in the military and political situation had been wrought in the land since 1884-85. Railways had _ solved every difficulty of dealing with the dervishes. Quite easily nowadays the remote provinces of the whilom great Egyptian equatorial empire can be reached and