All these little side-shows necessitated long night marches across countless desert hillocks. To the untrained eye, one square mile of country in Sinai is indistinguishable from any other square mile, even by daylight. At night all movement was by compass and the stars, and the task of our guides was complicated a hundredfold by the constant change of route imposed by the steepness of many of the sand dunes. Very early the Light Horseman displayed that apparently inborn sense of direction which, almost alone, would have made him famous in this campaign. After a brief trial, the native guides provided by the Imperial authorities were found to be too slow and uncertain, while, if the enemy was close, fear usually reduced them to a state of imbecility. As soon as this was recognized, the whole of the guiding was done by our own officers, many of whom developed a certainty of location, whatever the circumstances, which amounted almost to inspiration. FIRST GAZA [Illustration] Ten weeks after Rafa, on 26th March, came the first battle of Gaza. The scheme for the capture of this old gateway of Palestine proper was similar to that which succeeded so decisively at Rafa and Magdhaba. We were to move by night and envelop and isolate the town, with a view to its capture before the Turk could bring up reinforcements. But it was a far bigger enterprise than the two earlier raids. Modern Gaza is a fairly compact old town, which, before the war, contained 30,000 inhabitants. Most of the houses are of mud and straw, but there are also many substantial modern residences. The little city is graced by many mosques and minarets. Standing on a low hill on the inland edge of the wide belt of sand dunes, which, on this coast, everywhere fringe the Mediterranean, it is bounded on the north, east and south by an occasional fine orange grove, wide areas of olives and an intricate network of huge, sprawling cactus hedges surrounding hundreds of tiny fields. The Turks were soundly dug in, and well supported by many guns in commanding positions, while the irregular system of cactus hedges made an ideal barrier between them and the naked plain over which the attacking troops had to advance.