impossible, and in personal cleanliness a London scavenger could give a traveller by rail from Cairo to Assouan many points. It was at Wady Halfa that I got booked in the way-bill for Dakhala, or Atbara Camp, 390 miles away. The construction of the Halfa-Atbara line was, as I have said before, a masterpiece of military strategy, the credit for which is due to the Sirdar. By-and-by a railway bridge will span the Atbara at Dakhala, and the iron way will be laid into Khartoum. The 170 miles betwixt the Atbara and Khartoum offer no difficulties, and the line will be laid within a year from the time when the money is granted the Sirdar for its construction. Since the foregoing was written, the requisite amount has been voted Lord Kitchener of Khartoum, and the contracts for material have been issued and signed. About a quarter of a million sleepers have to be delivered in Egypt before the end of June 1899. The Atbara and forty small khors will be bridged, and the work be completed in twelve months. It is intended that the terminus shall be on the east bank opposite Khartoum. All the trains on the Halfa-Atbara line carried goods, ordinary passengers being incidental. Four of my colleagues, Major Sitwell, of the Egyptian army, and myself got places in a horse-box. In the next truck to us, likewise a horse-box, were five English officers, returning to duty with Gatacre's, or rather Wauchope's, brigade at Darmali. In that same horse-box truck we five contrived to cook, eat, sleep, and dress for two round days, for, as I have stated, there were no restaurants or buffets within 1000 miles of the desert railway. The wayside stations were but sidings or halting-places where the locomotives drew coal and water, of which small supplies were usually stored under an Egyptian corporal's guard. Ours was a long and heavy train, and more than once on the up grade to No. 6 or Summit station out from Halfa the engine came to a standstill, "to recover its breath," as the negroes said. In the horse-box we got along together for the most part very comfortably, accommodating ourselves to the situation. Such a picnic as we had then made it less of a puzzle to the common understanding how certain creatures are able to do with a tight-fitting shell for their house and home. If Major Girouard, R.E., had not left the direction of the Soudan military railways--which under the Sirdar he built--to join the Board of the Egyptian lines, we should, I believe, have had better provision made for passengers. Ziehs, or porous native clay-jars to hold cool drinking water, and various other little accessories to lighten the hardships of the trip would surely have been provided. Later on, the officials took care to have ziehs and plenty of cool drinking water in the carriages and trucks of all trains carrying troops, so that the men had at least plenty to drink.