THE SCENE AT WADY HALFA. 237 forge and engine. The chief buildings were metamorphosed and were devoted to a new purpose. The workshops were alive again with the sounds of saw, file, and hammer, the clink and clang of iron upon iron, the roar of the bellows, the harsh squeal of drill and augur perforating sheets of metal, were to be heard from morninof to night; while the station-house, a two-storied building surrounded by a broad verandah and so roofed as to keep the upper story (probably intended for offices) pleasantly cool, was converted into a "base" hospital — that is, a hospital at the base of the position from which the expedition was to start, and to which seriously invalided or wounded men could be sent back. There was room there for sixty patients. The other railway buildings had also been adapted to different purposes, one of them being Sir Evelyn Wood's headquarters, another was the commissariat; and the large engine-shop — already referred to as having been converted into a fort by Colonel Trotter — was used as a magazine.

Of course the troops, which at the earlier date arrived from Assouan, only remained at Wady Haifa till they could be sent on, and they chiefly occupied the houses at the head of the village, the officers taking up their quarters in the house of the local governor. It may be imagined that the bank of the Nile at Wady Haifa presented a lively bustling scene, and that the heaps of heterogeneous merchandise mingled with the stores and rations landed from the barges, dahabeeahs, and nuggars made a very entertaining spectacle to those who had little responsibility, it any such could be found. Certainly there were none among the officers, who, like the men, were living chiefly on "bully" beet and preserved potatoes. They must have regarded with a certain curious anxiety the discharged cargoes ot beer, of ostrich feathers, bales of gum and senna, elephants' tusks, jars of castor-oil, mixed up in almost inextricable confusion with pickaxes, railway sleepers, boilers, heaps of camel saddles, and all kinds of gear to be used in the passage of the coming boats. There was some method even amidst the apparent confusion, however, and every day the fiftyfour trucks of the railway made the journey to Sarras heavily