6 EGYPT AND THE SOUDAN.

mounted infantry. The baggage camels were arranged in column with from twenty to thirty marching abreast, and with fifty yards interval between each troop. The guards in front and the mounted infantry in rear were in close column of companies ready to dismount and form a square at a moment's notice. Lord Wolseley inspected the whole force, and the little party of cavalry scouts, under Major Kitchener, with six Arab guides, moved off in front. A quarter of an hour later the general gave the order, and the great column got in motion, striking straight across the undulating plain towards the distant horizon, the two thousand camels with their necks stretched out, and their long legs moving slowly in apparently mechanical strides, until the rising dust enveloped them and all that followed in a gray mist, and finally hid from view the whole column, which, broad as was its face, extended for a mile in length.

No natives accompanied the column, except the guides who went with the hussar scouts, a few others with a guard of mounted infantry in the rear, a few servants from Cairo, and the cameldrivers.

The first regular wells at which the column would arrive were at Hambok, about forty miles distant, and they are merely holes dug in the sand and deepened as the subterranean waters fall, until either the sides cave in, or the whole excavation is obliterated by the rush of water clown the wady during the rainy season. The water is mostly drawn from these and all similar wells in the Bayiida by means of rough skin bags, and is then poured into small earthen cisterns made on the surface, at which camels, sheep, and horses are watered; these wells are rarely more than twenty to twenty-five feet deep.

Near this point, at thirty-eight miles from Ambukol, the wady, which has hitherto been flat and sandy, with very gently sloping sides, becomes much broken, small metamorphic ridges, hills, and lava-like mounds close in, showing that the belt of metamorphic rock intervening between the lower Nubian sandstone and the extensive granite rocks is beimr traversed. The hills assume curious forms : some, of black basalt, are almost perfectly conical, whilst the rock of which they are composed is so magnetic as