On the 26th of August we were told to hold ourselves in readiness to embark on the _Metemmeh_ next morning. The Gyppy troops and Sudanese had already gone, and a general exodus of the British battalions was taking place. On the evening before our departure I strolled once more along the river. Scarcely a sound broke the silence; the busy scene of the day's restless activity was still. The rows and rows of tents and mountainous heaps of baggage had vanished like magic; little remained to show that for more than a week some twenty-two thousand men had lived and moved within this vast area. Here and there various relics of the encampment lay scattered about,--soda-water bottles, empty tins, old newspapers, the framework of blanket tents, and so on,--but the only permanent structure which marked, and perhaps still marks, the site of the abandoned camp was a wattled hut which Howard's servant built for him, as his master had arrived at Wad Hamed without a tent of any kind. An army of vultures had spread over all the space within the zeriba, and seemed to be having a good time amongst old sardine tins and fragments of offal and similar dainties. The glow of a tropical sunset was falling on the Nile; yet, beautiful as it was, the scene lost something from the dead level of the surrounding prospect. For an ideally beautiful effect of the kind one needs mountains as well as water. Who, for example, that has ever seen it, can forget the play of moonbeam and starlight on the lake-- When the blue waves roll nightly on deep Galilee? It was strange to think that within a week the campaign would be ended, Gordon avenged, and the Crescent flag flying over the ramparts of Omdurman--the final goal of all this vast congeries of men and stores, guns and ammunition. As the postal connection with the outside world was now to cease until the capture of Omdurman, many letters had been sent off on the previous day, and for several of the writers the message which sped home was a final one. Later on, when the battle had been fought, a man whom I knew showed me a letter which he was sending off to his widowed mother to tell her that he had come safe through the fight and was on the point of returning home. This note reached its destination a day after the receipt of a telegram announcing his death from fever! Surely it would be difficult to meet with a sadder and more pathetic instance of the vicissitudes and uncertainty of human life! FOOTNOTE: [1] A brief list of the entomological specimens brought back from the campaign is given on p. 253. [Illustration: THE NILE from the Atbara to Khartum. Scale 1 : 1,500,000. _R. V. Darbishire 1898._] CHAPTER III THE WEEK BEFORE THE BATTLE