The Sirdar gave a great dinner, at which he invited all the British and Egyptian commanding officers to meet the "tourists" from the south. Our simultaneous arrival was an extraordinary coincidence: Milne and Gage from the east, De Tonquedec, Bertrand, and Henri from the west, I from the south, and Hayes-Sadler from the north, and that in what was almost the uttermost end of the earth. After the dinner there was a great Soudanese dance; all the battalions broke up into their tribes and danced their tribal dances by torchlight: the spectacle was most weird. Sir Francis Wingate kindly asked me to stay with him at the Palace, which is already nearly completed. The Soudan railway soon carried us down to Wady Halfa, thence a steamer to Assuan, and again the railway, and we once more stood in the roar of multitudes at the station in Cairo. And now it is all over. A few dangers avoided, a few difficulties overcome, many disappointments, many discomforts, and those glorious days of my life are already dim in the haze of the past. Here I stand, in the prosaic land of certainty and respectability! But far, far away, on those Urema flats, where the night-wind sighs to the grazing herds, my thoughts soar to the plaintive wail of the fish-eagle, and my heart throbs in unison with the vast sob-sob of the grandest of all created beasts, that mighty sound that is the very spirit of the veld, the great untrammelled field of Nature, far from all carking cares, pettiness, hypocrisy, and cant: where men may stretch themselves in generous emulation, find their apportioned level, and humbly worship at the great shrine of creation. *CHAPTER XXIII.* *THE TRANS-CONTINENTAL RAILWAY.* Of the railway as far as Tanganyika I will say little, as I did not follow the route that has been selected. Its main scheme is already laid down. But the route to be followed beyond the south end of Tanganyika is another matter, and one that will need much discussion.