192 EGYPT AND THE SOUDAN.

were killed. On arriving at Assiout a number of the men under ringleaders refused to embark for Assouan, and threatened to seize the ammunition unless they received three months' pay in advance. The officers, however, with the aid of the native police transferred the ammunition boxes from the train to the station. Thirty of the men made off and reached the left bank of the river, to which Colonel Grant crossed accompanied by five native policemen, and found the deserters in the house of a village sheikh which he entered. The Turks made a rush for their arms, but he used his revolver and wounded two of them. The others, meanwhile, had seized their rifles and run out to the open space, where they formed in skirmishing order and began to fire at their colonel, who, however, returned their fire with such coolness that they were cowed, and ultimately laid down their arms and were conveyed to prison. The remaining men of the battalion mutinied the same evening, refusing to go to Assouan; but twenty-five men of the Cornwall regiment, who had arrived at Assiout, made short work of disarming the whole battalion, and ten of the ringleaders were sent off to Cairo under an Egyptian guard.

This incident was not calculated to impress our officers with the advantage of employing Turkish troops, who apparently had as much objection to probable service in the Soudan as the Egyptians themselves.

There was no time to waste over mutinous troops, for active preparations were made for the defence of the Egyptian frontier and the extension of the outposts and stations preliminary to that advance towards Khartum which was now considered certain, though neither the complete organization of the expedition that was to be sent, nor the route which it was to take, seemed to have been decided.

There were, in fact, four alternative routes by which to reach Khartum, viz. by way of Kassala, by Suakim and Berber, the Nile from Wady Haifa, or the Korosko desert. The choice of the first, apparently depended upon the result of the negotiations which Admiral Hewett endeavoured to accomplish with King John of Abyssinia, and at one time it seemed probable that the savage