THE LAST RECONNAISSANCE
"No one," said Durrance, and he strapped his field-glasses into the
leather 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 two
seven-pounder mountain-guns closed up behind, and Durrance's detachment
of the Camel Corps moved down from the gloomy ridge of Khor Gwob,
thirty-five miles southwest of Suakin, into the plateau of Sinkat. It
was the last reconnaissance in strength before the evacuation of the
eastern Soudan.
All through that morning the camels had jolted slowly up the gulley of
shale 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 broken
the monotony of ruin. And after that arid journey the green bushes of
Sinkat in the valley below comforted the eye with the pleasing aspect of
a park. The troopers sat their saddles with a greater alertness.
They moved in a diagonal line across the plateau toward the mountains of
Erkoweet, a silent company on a plain still more silent. It was eleven
o'clock. The sun rose toward the centre of a colourless, cloudless sky,
the shadows of the camels shortened upon the sand, and the sand itself
glistened white as a beach of the Scilly Islands. There was no draught
of air that morning to whisper amongst the rich foliage, and the shadows
of the branches lay so distinct and motionless upon the ground that they
might themselves have been branches strewn there on some past day by a
storm. The only sounds that were audible were the sharp clank of
weapons, the soft ceaseless padding of the camels' feet, and at times
the whirr of a flight of pigeons disturbed by the approaching cavalcade.
Yet there was life on the plateau, though of a noiseless kind. For as
the leaders rode along the curves of sand, trim and smooth between the
shrubs like carriage drives, they would see from time to time, far ahead
of them, a herd of gazelle start up from the ground and race silently, a
flash of dappled brown and white, to the enclosing hills. It seemed that
here was a country during this last hour created.
"Yet this way the caravans passed southwards to Erkoweet and the Khor
Baraka. 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," said
Mather, pointing forward.
For three hours the troops marched across the plateau. It was the month
of May, and the sun blazed upon them with an intolerable heat. They had
long since lost their alertness. They rode rocking drowsily in their
saddles and prayed for the evening and the silver shine of stars. For
three hours the camels went mincing on with their queer smirking
motions of the head, and then quite suddenly a hundred yards ahead
Durrance 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 another
siege, and one no less persistent. The quick-growing trees had so
closely girt and encroached upon it to the rear and to the right and to
the left, that the traveller came upon it unexpectedly, as Childe Roland
upon the Dark Tower in the plain. In the front, however, the sand still
stretched open to the wells, where three great Gemeiza trees of dark and
spreading foliage stood spaced like sentinels.
In the shadow to the right front of the fort, where the bushes fringed
the open sand with the level regularity of a river bank, the soldiers
unsaddled their camels and prepared their food. Durrance and Captain
Mather 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 grey
ashes 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 of
the entrance, and passed into the unroofed corridors and rooms. Durrance
turned the ashes over with his boot. The stump of a charred and whitened
twig glowed red. Durrance set his foot upon it, and a tiny thread of
smoke spurted into the air.
"Very lately," he said to himself, and he followed Mather into the
fort. In the corners of the mud walls, in any fissure, in the very
floor, young trees were sprouting. Rearward a steep glacis and a deep
fosse defended the works. Durrance sat himself down upon the parapet of
the wall above the glacis, while the pigeons wheeled and circled
overhead, thinking of the long months during which Tewfik must daily
have strained his eyes from this very spot toward the pass over the
hills from Suakin, looking as that other general far to the south had
done, for the sunlight flashing on the weapons of the help which did not
come. Mather sat by his side and reflected in quite another spirit.
"Already the Guards are steaming out through the coral reefs toward
Suez. A week and our turn comes," he said. "What a God-forsaken
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 Soudan. 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, dashed from the shelter and raced 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 Kabbabish 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 zamshyehs,
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 Berber at night,
three weeks ago. The story is curious, eh?"
"And the letter still remains in the wall? It is curious. Perhaps the
man 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 of
the plateau, and climbed again over shale.
"A letter from Gordon," said Durrance, in a musing voice, "scribbled
perhaps upon the roof-top of his palace, by the side of his great
telescope--a sentence written in haste, and his eye again to the lens,
searching over the palm trees for the smoke of the steamers--and it
comes down the Nile to be buried in a mud wall in Berber. Yes, it's
curious," and he turned his face to the west and the sinking sun. Even
as he looked, the sun dipped behind the hills. The sky above his head
darkened rapidly, to violet; in the west it flamed a glory of colours
rich and iridescent. The colours lost their violence and blended
delicately into one rose hue, the rose lingered for a little, and,
fading in its turn, left a sky of the purest emerald green transfused
with light from beneath rim of the world.
"If only they had let us go last year westward to the Nile," he said
with a sort of passion. "Before Khartum had fallen, before Berber had
surrendered. But they would not."
The magic of the sunset was not at all in Durrance's thoughts. The story
of the letter had struck upon a chord of reverence within him. He was
occupied with the history of that honest, great, impracticable soldier,
who, despised by officials and thwarted by intrigues, a man of few ties
and much loneliness, had gone unflaggingly about his work, knowing the
while that the moment his back was turned the work was in an instant all
undone.
Darkness came upon the troops, the camels quickened their pace, the
cicadas shrilled from every tuft of grass. The detachment moved down
toward the well of Disibil. Durrance lay long awake that night on his
camp bedstead spread out beneath the stars. He forgot the letter in the
mud wall. Southward the Southern Cross hung slanting in the sky, above
him glittered the curve of the Great Bear. In a week he would sail for
England; he lay awake, counting up the years since the packet had cast
off 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 even
now at the recollection of the Hadendowas leaping and stabbing through
the breach of McNeil's zareba six miles from Suakin; he recalled the
obdurate defence of the Berkshires, the steadiness of the Marines, the
rallying of the broken troops. The years had been good years, years of
plenty, years which had advanced him to the brevet-rank of
lieutenant-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. Not
to write letters was indeed a part of the man. Correspondence was a
difficulty to him. He was thinking now that he would surprise his
friends 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 his
life's work lay here in the Soudan. He would certainly come back. And
so, turning on his side, he slept dreamlessly while the hosts of the
stars trampled across the heavens above his head.
* * * * *
Now, at this moment Abou Fatma of the Kabbabish tribe was sleeping under
a boulder on the Khor Gwob. He rose early and continued along the broad
plains to the white city of Suakin. There he repeated the story which he
had told to Durrance to one Captain Willoughby, who was acting for the
time as deputy-governor. After he had come from the Palace he told his
story again, but this time in the native bazaar. He told it in Arabic,
and it happened that a Greek seated outside a café close at hand
overheard 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 diagrams
in the dust, not knowing that during his imprisonment the town of Berber
had 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 men
talked secretly together. The Greek happened to be Harry Feversham whom
Durrance was proposing to visit in Donegal. Captain Willoughby was
Deputy-Governor of Suakin, and after three years of waiting one of Harry
Feversham's opportunities had come.