CHAPTER VII
THE LAST RECONNAISSANCE
"No one," said Durrance, and he strapped his field-glasses into theleather case at his side.
"No one, sir," Captain Mather agreed.
"We will move forward."
The scouts went on ahead, the troops resumed their formation, the twoseven-pounder mountain-guns closed up behind, and Durrance's detachmentof the Camel Corps moved down from the gloomy ridge of Khor Gwob,thirty-five miles southwest of Suakin, into the plateau of Sinkat. Itwas the last reconnaissance in strength before the evacuation of theeastern Soudan.
All through that morning the camels had jolted slowly up the gulley ofshale between red precipitous rocks, and when the rocks fell back,between red mountain-heaps all crumbled into a desolation of stones.Hardly a patch of grass or the ragged branches of a mimosa had brokenthe monotony of ruin. And after that arid journey the green bushes ofSinkat in the valley below comforted the eye with the pleasing aspect ofa park. The troopers sat their saddles with a greater alertness.
They moved in a diagonal line across the plateau toward the mountains ofErkoweet, a silent company on a plain still more silent. It was eleveno'clock. The sun rose toward the centre of a colourless, cloudless sky,the shadows of the camels shortened upon the sand, and the sand itselfglistened white as a beach of the Scilly Islands. There was no draughtof air that morning to whisper amongst the rich foliage, and the shadowsof the branches lay so distinct and motionless upon the ground that theymight themselves have been branches strewn there on some past day by astorm. The only sounds that were audible were the sharp clank ofweapons, the soft ceaseless padding of the camels' feet, and at timesthe whirr of a flight of pigeons disturbed by the approaching cavalcade.Yet there was life on the plateau, though of a noiseless kind. For asthe leaders rode along the curves of sand, trim and smooth between theshrubs like carriage drives, they would see from time to time, far aheadof them, a herd of gazelle start up from the ground and race silently, aflash of dappled brown and white, to the enclosing hills. It seemed thathere was a country during this last hour created.
"Yet this way the caravans passed southwards to Erkoweet and the KhorBaraka. Here the Suakis built their summer-houses," said Durrance,answering the thought in his mind.
"And there Tewfik fought, and died with his four hundred men," saidMather, pointing forward.
For three hours the troops marched across the plateau. It was the monthof May, and the sun blazed upon them with an intolerable heat. They hadlong since lost their alertness. They rode rocking drowsily in theirsaddles and prayed for the evening and the silver shine of stars. Forthree hours the camels went mincing on with their queer smirkingmotions of the head, and then quite suddenly a hundred yards aheadDurrance saw a broken wall with window-spaces which let the sky through.
"The fort," said he.
Three years had passed since Osman Digna had captured and destroyed it,but during these three years its roofless ruins had sustained anothersiege, and one no less persistent. The quick-growing trees had soclosely girt and encroached upon it to the rear and to the right and tothe left, that the traveller came upon it unexpectedly, as Childe Rolandupon the Dark Tower in the plain. In the front, however, the sand stillstretched open to the wells, where three great Gemeiza trees of dark andspreading foliage stood spaced like sentinels.
In the shadow to the right front of the fort, where the bushes fringedthe open sand with the level regularity of a river bank, the soldiersunsaddled their camels and prepared their food. Durrance and CaptainMather walked round the fort, and as they came to the southern corner,Durrance stopped.
"Hallo!" said he.
"Some Arab has camped here," said Mather, stopping in his turn. The greyashes of a wood fire lay in a little heap upon a blackened stone.
"And lately," said Durrance.
Mather walked on, mounted a few rough steps to the crumbled archway ofthe entrance, and passed into the unroofed corridors and rooms. Durranceturned the ashes over with his boot. The stump of a charred and whitenedtwig glowed red. Durrance set his foot upon it, and a tiny thread ofsmoke spurted into the air.
"Very lately," he said to himself, and he followed Mather into thefort. In the corners of the mud walls, in any fissure, in the veryfloor, young trees were sprouting. Rearward a steep glacis and a deepfosse defended the works. Durrance sat himself down upon the parapet ofthe wall above the glacis, while the pigeons wheeled and circledoverhead, thinking of the long months during which Tewfik must dailyhave strained his eyes from this very spot toward the pass over thehills from Suakin, looking as that other general far to the south haddone, for the sunlight flashing on the weapons of the help which did notcome. Mather sat by his side and reflected in quite another spirit.
"Already the Guards are steaming out through the coral reefs towardSuez. A week and our turn comes," he said. "What a God-forsakencountry!"
"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 rapidpromotion and success. Sympathy had stood Durrance in the stead of muchability. Sympathy had given him patience and the power to understand, sothat during these three years of campaign he had left far quicker andfar abler men behind him, in his knowledge of the sorely harassed tribesof the eastern Soudan. He liked them; he could enter into their hatredof the old Turkish rule, he could understand their fanaticism, and theirpretence of fanaticism under the compulsion of Osman Digna's hordes.
"Yes, I shall come back," he said, "and in three months' time. For onething, we know--every Englishman in Egypt, too, knows--that this can'tbe the end. I want to be here when the work's taken in hand again. Ihate unfinished things."
The sun beat relentlessly upon the plateau; the men, stretched in theshade, slept; the afternoon was as noiseless as the morning; Durranceand Mather sat for some while compelled to silence by the silencesurrounding them. But Durrance's eyes turned at last from theamphitheatre of hills; they lost their abstraction, they became intentlyfixed upon the shrubbery beyond the glacis. He was no longerrecollecting Tewfik Bey and his heroic defence, or speculating upon thework to be done in the years ahead. Without turning his head, he sawthat 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 reachLondon. I will eat it alone, I think, quite alone, and at Epitaux. Itwill begin with a watermelon. And you?"
"I was wondering why, now that the pigeons have got used to ourpresence, they should still be wheeling in and out of one particulartree. Don't point to it, please! I mean the tree beyond the ditch, andto the right of two small bushes."
All about them they could see the pigeons quietly perched upon thebranches, spotting the foliage like a purple fruit. Only above the onetree they circled and timorously called.
"We will draw that covert," said Durrance. "Take a dozen men andsurround it quietly."
He himself remained on the glacis watching the tree and the thickundergrowth. He saw six soldiers creep round the shrubbery from theleft, six more from the right. But before they could meet and ring thetree in, he saw the branches violently shaken, and an Arab with a rollof yellowish dammar wound about his waist, and armed with a flat-headedspear and a shield of hide, dashed from the shelter and raced outbetween 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 heunderstood that order, came to a stop before a rifle could be lifted toa shoulder. He walked quietly back to Mather. He was brought up on tothe glacis, where he stood before Durrance without insolence orservility.
He explained in Arabic that he was a man of the Kabbabish tribe namedAbou Fatma, and friendly to the English. He was on his way to Suakin.
&nb
sp; "Why did you hide?" asked Durrance.
"It was safer. I knew you for my friends. But, my gentleman, did youknow me for yours?"
Then Durrance said quickly, "You speak English," and Durrance spoke inEnglish.
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 twomen talked together for the best part of an hour. At the end of thattime the Arab was seen to descend the glacis, cross the trench, andproceed toward the hills. Durrance gave the order for the resumption ofthe march.
The water-tanks were filled, the men replenished their zamshyehs,knowing that of all thirsts in this world the afternoon thirst is thevery worst, saddled their camels, and mounted to the usual groaning andsnarling. The detachment moved northwestward from Sinkat, at an acuteangle to its morning's march. It skirted the hills opposite to the passfrom which it had descended in the morning. The bushes grew sparse. Itcame into a black country of stones scantily relieved by yellowtasselled mimosas.
Durrance called Mather to his side.
"That Arab had a strange story to tell me. He was Gordon's servant inKhartum. At the beginning of 1884, eighteen months ago in fact, Gordongave him a letter which he was to take to Berber, whence the contentswere to be telegraphed to Cairo. But Berber had just fallen when themessenger arrived there. He was seized upon and imprisoned the day afterhis arrival. But during the one day which he had free he hid the letterin the wall of a house, and so far as he knows it has not beendiscovered."
"He would have been questioned if it had been," said Mather.
"Precisely, and he was not questioned. He escaped from Berber at night,three weeks ago. The story is curious, eh?"
"And the letter still remains in the wall? It is curious. Perhaps theman was telling lies."
"He had the chain mark on his ankles," said Durrance.
The cavalcade turned to the left into the hills on the northern side ofthe plateau, and climbed again over shale.
"A letter from Gordon," said Durrance, in a musing voice, "scribbledperhaps upon the roof-top of his palace, by the side of his greattelescope--a sentence written in haste, and his eye again to the lens,searching over the palm trees for the smoke of the steamers--and itcomes down the Nile to be buried in a mud wall in Berber. Yes, it'scurious," and he turned his face to the west and the sinking sun. Evenas he looked, the sun dipped behind the hills. The sky above his headdarkened rapidly, to violet; in the west it flamed a glory of coloursrich and iridescent. The colours lost their violence and blendeddelicately into one rose hue, the rose lingered for a little, and,fading in its turn, left a sky of the purest emerald green transfusedwith light from beneath rim of the world.
"If only they had let us go last year westward to the Nile," he saidwith a sort of passion. "Before Khartum had fallen, before Berber hadsurrendered. But they would not."
The magic of the sunset was not at all in Durrance's thoughts. The storyof the letter had struck upon a chord of reverence within him. He wasoccupied with the history of that honest, great, impracticable soldier,who, despised by officials and thwarted by intrigues, a man of few tiesand much loneliness, had gone unflaggingly about his work, knowing thewhile that the moment his back was turned the work was in an instant allundone.
Darkness came upon the troops, the camels quickened their pace, thecicadas shrilled from every tuft of grass. The detachment moved downtoward the well of Disibil. Durrance lay long awake that night on hiscamp bedstead spread out beneath the stars. He forgot the letter in themud wall. Southward the Southern Cross hung slanting in the sky, abovehim glittered the curve of the Great Bear. In a week he would sail forEngland; he lay awake, counting up the years since the packet had castoff from Dover pier, and he found that the tale of them was good.Kassassin, Tel-el-Kebir, the rush down the Red Sea, Tokar, Tamai,Tamanieb--the crowded moments came vividly to his mind. He thrilled evennow at the recollection of the Hadendowas leaping and stabbing throughthe breach of McNeil's zareba six miles from Suakin; he recalled theobdurate defence of the Berkshires, the steadiness of the Marines, therallying of the broken troops. The years had been good years, years ofplenty, years which had advanced him to the brevet-rank oflieutenant-colonel.
"A week more--only a week," murmured Mather, drowsily.
"I shall come back," said Durrance, with a laugh.
"Have you no friends?"
And there was a pause.
"Yes, I have friends. I shall have three months wherein to see them."
Durrance had written no word to Harry Feversham during these years. Notto write letters was indeed a part of the man. Correspondence was adifficulty to him. He was thinking now that he would surprise hisfriends by a visit to Donegal, or he might find them perhaps in London.He would ride once again in the Row. But in the end he would come back.For his friend was married, and to Ethne Eustace, and as for himself hislife's work lay here in the Soudan. He would certainly come back. Andso, turning on his side, he slept dreamlessly while the hosts of thestars trampled across the heavens above his head.
* * * * *
Now, at this moment Abou Fatma of the Kabbabish tribe was sleeping undera boulder on the Khor Gwob. He rose early and continued along the broadplains to the white city of Suakin. There he repeated the story which hehad told to Durrance to one Captain Willoughby, who was acting for thetime as deputy-governor. After he had come from the Palace he told hisstory again, but this time in the native bazaar. He told it in Arabic,and it happened that a Greek seated outside a cafe close at handoverheard something of what was said. The Greek took Abou Fatma aside,and with a promise of much merissa, wherewith to intoxicate himself,induced him to tell it a fourth time and very slowly.
"Could you find the house again?" asked the Greek.
Abou Fatma had no doubts upon that score. He proceeded to draw diagramsin the dust, not knowing that during his imprisonment the town of Berberhad been steadily pulled down by the Mahdists and rebuilt to the north.
"It will be wise to speak of this to no one except me," said the Greek,jingling some significant dollars, and for a long while the two mentalked secretly together. The Greek happened to be Harry Feversham whomDurrance was proposing to visit in Donegal. Captain Willoughby wasDeputy-Governor of Suakin, and after three years of waiting one of HarryFeversham's opportunities had come.