The Egyptian campaigns continued off and on for sixteen years (1882-1898) till Lord Kitchener beat the Mahdi far south in the wild Soudan. British sea-power, as it always does, worked the sea lines of communication over which the army's supplies had to go to the front from England and elsewhere, and, again as usual, put the army in the best possible place from which to strike inland. Needless to say, the naval part of British sea-power not only helped and protected the mercantile part, which carried the supplies, but helped both in the fighting and the inland water transport too. At one time (1885) the little Naval Brigade on the Nile had to be led by a boatswain, every officer having been killed or wounded. In the attempt to rescue the saintly and heroic General Gordon from Khartoum, Lord Beresford rigged up the little Egyptian steamer _Safieh_ with armour plates and took her past an enemy fort that could easily have sunk her as she went by, only eighty yards away, if his machine-gunners had not kept such a stream of bullets whizzing through every hole from which an Egyptian gun stuck out that not a single Egyptian gunner could stand to his piece and live. Lord Beresford was well to the fore wherever hard work had to be done during that desperate venture; and it was he who performed the wonderful feat of getting the Nile steamers hauled through the Second Cataract by fifteen hundred British soldiers, who hove them up against that awful stream of death while the blue-jackets looked after the tackle. Beresford's Naval Brigade used to tramp fifteen miles a day along the river, sometimes work as many hours with no spell off for dinner, haul the whaleboats up-stream to where the rapids made a big loop, and then, avoiding the loop, portage them across the neck of land into the river again. Handling these boats in the killing heat would have been hard enough in any case; but it was made still worse by the scorpions that swarmed in them under the mats and darted out to bite the nearest hand. Beresford himself had to keep his weather eye on thirty miles of roaring river, on hundreds of soldiers and sailors, and on thousands of natives. Yet he managed it all quite handily by riding about on his three famous camels: Bimbashi, Ballyhooly, and Beelzebub.