402 
SAVAGE SUDAN 
be met with on desert jebels a day or two’s camelry 
beyond the mine (Um Nabardi)—in particular, at Jebel 
Raffit. 
The whole course of the track is punctuated by bones 
that protrude from the devouring- sand : great big bones 
—not all camel-bones—lie here in scattered units, else¬ 
where in piles, marking where some caravan has 
perished in mass. Eloquent these in their silence, 
bespeaking the murderous mission of the desert. 
At salient angles, fences flank the line to save it from 
being swallowed up bodily by engulfing sandstorms ; as, 
on North-British lines, similar safeguards are provided to 
hold back the driving snow. 
It was here that, in 1898, Kitchener drove through his 
desert-railway—pushed it forward complete at the rate 
of a mile a day— 
11 O’er sandy deserts, scorched and dun 
Stretched boundless ’neath a fiery sun ”— 
to the reconquest of the Sudan. Thirteen years earlier 
(in 1885) the foredoomed Gordon-relief Expedition—or 
its “desert-column”'—had traversed the desert afoot, only 
to reach Khartoum too late; its gallant efforts and yet 
more gallant lives sacrificed to vacillation at home. 
How easy to-day is the transit; between dawn and 
dusk a corridor-carriage on a tropical train de luxe conveys 
you across this Gehenna, which but a score of years 
ago demanded weeks of labour, resolution, and suffering 
to traverse. The least imaginative mind must perforce 
try to recall those scenes—the slow plodding trek, trek, 
trek, man and beast day after day sweltering ankle-deep 
under a tropic sun that blistered, the furnace-like rays 
from above reflected and intensified by the molten sands 
below; the agonies of thirst, of parched lips and torrid 
tongue; of aching eyes pelted by whirling “sand-devils” 
that cut and sting like molten shot and actually chisel-out 
the hard volcanic rock ; so the traveller struggled through 
—or sometimes ended short. 
