The boat moves on, fluttering with handkerchiefs, to the transport staging, always crowded with men, who are not nude. The shower of baksheesh is flung over again. Women are not notoriously good shots. For the packages that fall short the men leap in, clothes and all, and scramble, and reckon themselves well repaid. One afternoon the largest package for which clothes were wetted proved to be a bundle of _War-Cries_ and allied journals, dropped either by some humourist or by one sincerely exercised for the spiritual welfare of the troops. The latter was the inevitable assumption. The donor was greeted by the dripping warriors with a chorus of acknowledgments that could leave no doubt as to their spiritual needs. Soldiers have a religion, but they are not accustomed to make it explicit. The passing ships lighten the dulness. They bring a whiff of the great British civilian world that is otherwise so unrelentingly far removed, and which Cairo (when one does get there) brings very little nearer. The Canal is crossed at Serapoeum by pontoon ferry, row-boat, and pontoon-bridge. Take your choice. But that is not always possible. Sometimes the bridge is swung open for hours on end to allow liners, tugs, dhows, and launches to pass. It was built for vehicular and animal traffic--for the transport of supplies, in fact, from Egypt to the troops in Sinai. When open it therefore bears a constant stream of G.S. waggons loaded with army stores. It's one stage of the journey of beef from the plains of Queensland to the cook's "dixies" in the Sinaian desert trenches. Supplies are disembarked at Suez and Port Said, entrained to Egyptian Serapoeum, transported by waggon across this bridge to the desert railway terminus on the opposite bank; they are trucked out to railhead beyond the sandy horizon, and thence Canal trains bear them to the desert outposts for final distribution. And that is the chequered career of the Argentine ox, who never dared hope for himself any such distinction as that of contributing to the efficiency of His Majesty's Forces in the Peninsula of Sinai. The miniature desert railway is no despicable contrivance, puffing there and back-firing from its nuggety petrol engine. It can make fifteen miles an hour with fifteen trucks of supplies lumbering behind. Sometimes it leaves the somewhat flimsy track; sometimes it runs down an unaccustomed Arab in a desert dust-storm; and sometimes it "sticks" quite as annoyingly as any petrol-driven vehicle can do. Whatever the nature of the obstacle--mangled Arab or jibbing engine--there is lusty swearing; for the business of the desert railway is of more urgency than that of most links in the lines of communication. For instance, it--and it alone--can furnish with anything approaching expedition the daily water-supply of the advanced trenches in the April Arabian sand.