56 KHARTOUM CAMPAIGN.

my friends emerge from the ruins of canvas, bedding, and boxes, wild, half-clad, terra-cotta figures, such as may have escaped from the destruction of Pompeii.

But the human mind is a curious thing. It does not acknowledge defeat easily, and so a victim said to me he had pulled his tent down to keep it from falling.

The Dust Devil had nothing to do with it.

Early in August the situation assumed a peculiar interest to us of the fourth estate. We were told that the troops were shortly going forward to rendezvous at Nasri Island, whereas it was a matter of notoriety that Wad Habeshi, which was further south, had been selected as the advanced camp for the army on leaving Dakhala. Of course, not one word of the true state of matters were we permitted to wire home.

Detachments, true enough, had been sent ahead to “cut wood” and set up a camp upon Nasri Island.

But that was merely to have a secure secondary depét and hospital station. It had been ascertained after the occupation of Shendy that the dervishes were in no great strength at Shabluka or the Sixth Cataract.

They occasionally sent down about a thousand Baggara horsemen to that place, and their riders scouted around the bluff rocks and hills bordering the Nile on either side of the ‘bab,” or water-gateway and rapids of Shabluka. As a rule, only about two hundred of them ever crossed to the east bank. The others hung around on the west bank, and built low walls for riflemen and dug a number of trenches and then returned to Omdurman. A few hundred only remained to guard the forts and the narrow fairway. Much labour