At Halfa one feels the first breath of a frontier. Here the Egyptian
Government retires into the background, and even the Cook steamer does not
draw up in the exact centre of the postcard. At the telegraph-office, too,
there are traces, diluted but quite recognisable, of military
administration. Nor does the town, in any way or place whatever,
smell--which is proof that it is not looked after on popular lines. There
is nothing to see in it any more than there is in Hulk C. 60, late of her
Majesty's troopship _Himalaya_, now a coal-hulk in the Hamoaze at
Plymouth. A river front, a narrow terraced river-walk of semi-oriental
houses, barracks, a mosque, and half-a-dozen streets at right angles, the
Desert racing up to the end of each, make all the town. A mile or so up
stream under palm trees are bungalows of what must have been cantonments,
some machinery repair-shops, and odds and ends of railway track. It is all
as paltry a collection of whitewashed houses, pitiful gardens, dead walls,
and trodden waste spaces as one would wish to find anywhere; and every bit
of it quivers with the remembered life of armies and river-fleets, as the
finger-bowl rings when the rubbing finger is lifted. The most unlikely men
have done time there; stores by the thousand ton have been rolled and
pushed and hauled up the banks by tens of thousands of scattered hands;
hospitals have pitched themselves there, expanded enormously, shrivelled
up and drifted away with the drifting regiments; railway sidings by the
mile have been laid down and ripped up again, as need changed, and utterly
wiped out by the sands.
Halfa has been the rail-head, Army Headquarters, and hub of the
universe--the one place where a man could make sure of buying tobacco
and sardines, or could hope for letters for himself and medical
attendance for his friend. Now she is a little shrunken shell of a town
without a proper hotel, where tourists hurry up from the river to buy
complete sets of Soudan stamps at the Post Office.
I went for a purposeless walk from one end of the place to the other,
and found a crowd of native boys playing football on what might have
been a parade-ground of old days.
'And what school is that?' I asked in English of a small, eager youth.
'Madrissah,' said he most intelligently, which being translated means
just 'school.'
'Yes, but _what_ school?'
'Yes, Madrissah, school, sir,' and he tagged after to see what else the
imbecile wanted.
A line of railway track, that must have fed big workshops in its time,
led me between big-roomed houses and offices labelled departmentally,
with here and there a clerk at work. I was directed and re-directed by
polite Egyptian officials (I wished to get at a white officer if
possible, but there wasn't one about); was turned out of a garden which
belonged to an Authority; hung round the gate of a bungalow with an
old-established compound and two white men sitting in chairs on a
verandah; wandered down towards the river under the palm trees, where
the last red light came through; lost myself among rusty boilers and
balks of timber; and at last loafed back in the twilight escorted by the
small boy and an entire brigade of ghosts, not one of whom I had ever
met before, but all of whom I knew most intimately. They said it was the
evenings that used to depress _them_ most, too; so they all came back
after dinner and bore me company, while I went to meet a friend arriving
by the night train from Khartoum.
She was an hour late, and we spent it, the ghosts and I, in a
brick-walled, tin-roofed shed, warm with the day's heat; a crowd of
natives laughing and talking somewhere behind in the darkness. We knew
each other so well by that time, that we had finished discussing every
conceivable topic of conversation--the whereabouts of the Mahdi's head,
for instance--work, reward, despair, acknowledgment, flat failure, all
the real motives that had driven us to do anything, and all our other
longings. So we sat still and let the stars move, as men must do when
they meet this kind of train.
Presently I asked: 'What is the name of the next station out from
here?'
'Station Number One,' said a ghost.
'And the next?'
'Station Number Two, and so on to Eight, I think.'
'And wasn't it worth while to name even _one_ of these stations from
some man, living or dead, who had something to do with making the line?'
'Well, they didn't, anyhow,' said another ghost. 'I suppose they didn't
think it worth while. Why? What do _you_ think?'
'I think, I replied, 'it is the sort of snobbery that nations go to
Hades for.'
Her headlight showed at last, an immense distance off; the economic
electrics were turned up, the ghosts vanished, the dragomans of the
various steamers flowed forward in beautiful garments to meet their
passengers who had booked passages in the Cook boats, and the Khartoum
train decanted a joyous collection of folk, all decorated with horns,
hoofs, skins, hides, knives, and assegais, which they had been buying at
Omdurman. And when the porters laid hold upon their bristling bundles,
it was like MacNeill's Zareba without the camels.
Two young men in tarboushes were the only people who had no part in the
riot. Said one of them to the other:
'Hullo?'