“Already the Guards are steaming out through the coral reefs toward Suez. A week and our turn comes,” he said. “What a Godforsaken country!”
“I come back to it,” said Durrance.
“Why?”
“I like it. I like the people.”
Mather thought the taste unaccountable, but he knew nevertheless that, however unaccountable in itself, it accounted for his companion’s rapid promotion and success. Sympathy had stood Durrance in the stead of much ability. Sympathy had given him patience and the power to understand, so that during these three years of campaign he had left far quicker and far abler men behind him, in his knowledge of the sorely harassed tribes of the eastern Sudan. He liked them; he could enter into their hatred of the old Turkish rule, he could understand their fanaticism, and their pretence of fanaticism under the compulsion of Osman Digna’s hordes.
“Yes, I shall come back,” he said, “and in three months’ time. For one thing, we know—every Englishman in Egypt, too, knows—that this can’t be the end. I want to be here when the work’s taken in hand again. I hate unfinished things.”
The sun beat relentlessly upon the plateau; the men, stretched in the shade, slept; the afternoon was as noiseless as the morning; Durrance and Mather sat for some while compelled to silence by the silence surrounding them. But Durrance’s eyes turned at last from the amphitheatre of hills; they lost their abstraction, they became intently fixed upon the shrubbery beyond the glacis. He was no longer recollecting Tewfik Bey and his heroic defence, or speculating upon the work to be done in the years ahead. Without turning his head, he saw that Mather was gazing in the same direction as himself.
“What are you thinking about?” he asked suddenly of Mather.
Mather laughed, and answered thoughtfully:—
“I was drawing up the menu of the first dinner I will have when I reach London. I will eat it alone, I think, quite alone, and at Epitaux. It will begin with a watermelon. And you?”
“I was wondering why, now that the pigeons have got used to our presence, they should still be wheeling in and out of one particular tree. Don’t point to it, please! I mean the tree beyond the ditch, and to the right of two small bushes.”
All about them they could see the pigeons quietly perched upon the branches, spotting the foliage like a purple fruit. Only above the one tree they circled and timorously called.
“We will draw that covert,” said Durrance. “Take a dozen men and surround it quietly.”
He himself remained on the glacis watching the tree and the thick undergrowth. He saw six soldiers creep round the shrubbery from the left, six more from the right. But before they could meet and ring the tree in, he saw the branches violently shaken, and an Arab with a roll of yellowish dammar wound about his waist, and armed with a flat-headed spear and a shield of hide, dash from the shelter and race out between the soldiers into the open plain. He ran for a few yards only. For Mather gave a sharp order to his men, and the Arab, as though he understood that order, came to a stop before a rifle could be lifted to a shoulder. He walked quietly back to Mather. He was brought up on to the glacis, where he stood before Durrance without insolence or servility.
He explained in Arabic that he was a man of the Kababish tribe named Abou Fatma, and friendly to the English. He was on his way to Suakin.
“Why did you hide?” asked Durrance.
“It was safer. I knew you for my friends. But, my gentleman, did you know me for yours?”
Then Durrance said quickly, “You speak English,” and Durrance spoke in English.
The answer came without hesitation.
“I know a few words.”
“Where did you learn them?”
“In Khartum.”
Thereafter he was left alone with Durrance on the glacis, and the two men talked together for the best part of an hour. At the end of that time the Arab was seen to descend the glacis, cross the trench, and proceed toward the hills. Durrance gave the order for the resumption of the march.
The water-tanks were filled, the men replenished their water bottles, knowing that of all thirsts in this world the afternoon thirst is the very worst, saddled their camels, and mounted to the usual groaning and snarling. The detachment moved northwestward from Sinkat, at an acute angle to its morning’s march. It skirted the hills opposite to the pass from which it had descended in the morning. The bushes grew sparse. It came into a black country of stones scantily relieved by yellow tasselled mimosas.
Durrance called Mather to his side.
“That Arab had a strange story to tell me. He was Gordon’s servant in Khartum. At the beginning of 1884, eighteen months ago in fact, Gordon gave him a letter which he was to take to Berber, whence the contents were to be telegraphed to Cairo. But Berber had just fallen when the messenger arrived there. He was seized upon and imprisoned the day after his arrival. But during the one day which he had free he hid the letter in the wall of a house, and so far as he knows it has not been discovered.”
“He would have been questioned if it had been,” said Mather.
“Precisely, and he was not questioned. He escaped from
