The boundary between Egypt and the Soudan, settled by the Convention of 1899, runs along the twenty-second parallel; not far beyond this is the frontier town of Halfa. There is no mistaking the signs of British rule. The whole place is rigidly clean, an extraordinary contrast to the filth of the Egyptian villages. The streets are well laid out and scrupulously swept, and shady avenues of trees are springing up. But at present Halfa is not particularly interesting, except as the railway terminus of the Soudan. It is twenty-eight hours to Khartoum. Nothing can be more comfortable than the well-appointed sleeping-car train, which runs twice a week. Starting at eight in the evening, you strike right across the Nubian Desert, most desolate and forlorn of countries. The very stations have no names, but are known merely by their numbers. In the morning you come to Abu Hamed, back to the Nile once more. Abu Hamed is just at the elbow of the river, where it turns to the west for its great circuit by Merowe and Dongola. Here was the scene of one of the stiffest fights in the Soudan Campaign, when General Hunter made his dash from Korti, in 1897, further down the Nile, to seize the point for which the new railway was making from Wadi Halfa, and here are the graves of Fitzclarence and Sidney, officers of the 10th Soudanese, who fell in the battle. Around this spot a ghostly legend hangs. It happened that the other white officers of the battalion were wounded on the same day, and the black troops marched back to their bivouac without any of their white leaders. A black regiment is always accompanied by its women on the march, and these have high notions of military honour. They would have nothing to do with men who dared to return alive from the field on which their officers had fallen. The warriors quailed before their wives, and serious trouble was brewing, till a black sergeant, who lay dying of his wounds, solved the difficulty. ‘Tell the women,’ he said, ‘that enough of us are dead to guard the spirits of the white men in the other world. I myself will mount the guard.’ There are innumerable witnesses to testify that he has kept his word. The lesson was not lost. It was the same battalion which later, at the Atbara, raced the Camerons for the enemy’s zareba, and, catching their Colonel as he ran in front of them, bore him heels foremost right through the camp, securely hedged by a living wall of bodies, because a second loss like that of Abu Hamed was not to be thought of.