XII
Durrance Sharpens His Wits
It was a night of May, and outside the mess-room at Wadi Halfa three officers were smoking on a grass knoll above the Nile. The moon was at its full, and the strong light had robbed even the planets of their lustre. The smaller stars were not visible at all, and the sky, washed of its dark colour, curved overhead, pearly-hued and luminous. The three officers sat in their lounge chairs and smoked silently, while the bullfrogs croaked from an island in mid-river. At the bottom of the small steep cliff on which they sat, the Nile, so sluggish was its flow, shone like a burnished mirror, and from the opposite bank the desert stretched away to infinite distances, a vast plain with scattered hummocks, a plain white as a hoar frost on the surface of which the stones sparkled like jewels. Behind the three officers of the garrison the roof of the mess-room verandah threw a shadow on the ground; it seemed a solid piece of blackness.
One of the three officers struck a match and held it to the end of his cigar. The flame lit up a troubled and anxious face.
“I hope that no harm has come to him,” he said, as he threw the match away. “I wish that I could say I believed it.”
The speaker was a man of middle age and the colonel of a Sudanese battalion. He was answered by a man whose hair had gone grey, it is true. But grey hair is frequent in the Sudan, and his unlined face still showed that he was young. He was Lieutenant Calder of the Engineers. Youth, however, in this instance had no optimism wherewith to challenge Colonel Dawson.
“He left Halfa eight weeks ago, eh?” he said gloomily.
“Eight weeks today,” replied the colonel.
It was the third officer, a tall, spare, long-necked major of the Army Service Corps, who alone hazarded a cheerful prophecy.
“It’s early days to conclude Durrance has got scuppered,” said he. “One knows Durrance. Give him a campfire in the desert, and a couple of sheiks to sit round it with him, and he’ll buck to them for a month and never feel bored at the end. While here there are letters, and there’s an office, and there’s a desk in the office and everything he loathes and can’t do with. You’ll see Durrance will turn up right enough, though he won’t hurry about it.”
“He is three weeks overdue,” objected the colonel, “and he’s methodical after a fashion. I am afraid.”
Major Walters pointed out his arm to the white empty desert across the river.
“If he had travelled that way, westward, I might agree,” he said. “But Durrance went east through the mountain country toward Berenice and the Red Sea. The tribes he went to visit were quiet, even in the worst times, when Osman Digna lay before Suakin.”
The colonel, however, took no comfort from Walters’ confidence. He tugged at his moustache and repeated: “He is three weeks overdue.”
Lieutenant Calder knocked the ashes from his pipe and refilled it. He leaned forward in his chair as he pressed the tobacco down with his thumb, and he said slowly:—
“I wonder. It is just possible that some sort of trap was laid for Durrance. I am not sure. I never mentioned before what I knew, because until lately I did not suspect that it could have anything to do with his delay. But now I begin to wonder. You remember the night before he started?”
“Yes,” said Dawson, and he hitched his chair a little nearer. Calder was the one man in Wadi Halfa who could claim something like intimacy with Durrance. Despite their difference in rank there was no great disparity in age between the two men, and from the first, when Calder had come inexperienced and fresh from England, but with a great ardour to acquire a comprehensive experience, Durrance in his reticent way had been at pains to show the newcomer considerable friendship. Calder, therefore, might be likely to know.
“I, too, remember that night,” said Walters. “Durrance dined at the mess, and went away early to prepare for his journey.”
“His preparations were made already,” said Calder. “He went away early, as you say. But he did not go to his quarters. He walked along the riverbank to Tewfikieh.”
Wadi Halfa was the military station, Tewfikieh a little frontier town to the north separated from Halfa by a mile of riverbank. A few Greeks kept stores there, a few bare and dirty cafés faced the street between native cook-shops and tobacconists’; a noisy little town where the negro from the Dinka country jostled the fellah from the Delta, and the air was torn with many dialects; a thronged little town, which yet lacked to European ears one distinctive element of a throng. There was no ring of footsteps. The crowd walked on sand, and for the most part with naked feet, so that if for a rare moment the sharp high cries and the perpetual voices ceased, the figures of men and women flitted by noiseless as ghosts. And even at night, when the streets were most crowded and the uproar loudest, it seemed that underneath the noise, and almost appreciable to the ear, there lay a deep and brooding silence, the silence of deserts and the East.
“Durrance went down to Tewfikieh at ten o’clock that night,” said Calder. “I went to his quarters at eleven. He had not returned. He was starting eastward at four in the morning, and there was some detail of business on which I wished to speak to him before he went. So I waited for his return. He came in about a quarter of an hour afterwards and told
