During the earlier portion of our first day's march (16th August) the track lay along the edge of a pebbly desert, which left but a skirting of one to three miles of loam and rank vegetation between its measureless sterility and the tawny Nile waters. The small rounded pebbles and the fine sand of the Nubian wilderness were surely fashioned in some great lake or sea of a prehistoric past. Far as we were from the dervishes, a childish terror of them was entertained by the servants. At the last moment several domestics decamped, my cook among them. I rode back three miles to catch the rascal. With unwonted alacrity and prescience he had recrossed to the opposite bank before I arrived at the place of bivouac, and, having no time, I had to retrace my steps without his enforced attendance. It had been arranged that the column should only go fifteen miles the first day. What with winding and twisting to avoid flooded khors or shallow gulleys we marched over twenty miles I fancy. At any rate, with no protracted halting for meals or for baiting the animals, we trudged on throughout the heat and worry of the day until sunset. It was putting both men and animals to the severest possible strain, and few of the soldiers, at least, had had any preliminary hardening, for they had been travelling for days by boat and train and were out of condition. As a rule, the Lancers trotted a few miles ahead, halted, dismounted, and waited for the convoy to come up. Then they would ride on again, halt, and so on, repeating the proceeding many times during each day's march. From start to finish the column was ever a loosely-jointed body. The pace was slow, little more than 2 1/4 miles an hour, though Sir Herbert Stewart's Bayuda desert column managed to average upon a longer and almost waterless route, from Korti to Metemmeh, 2 3/4 miles an hour. In that campaign, however, most of our marching was done during the cooler hours of very early morning and late eventide.