When his forces were strengthened sufficiently he issued forth, and in turn caught the nomads by surprise. The soldiers, who had been chafing under the reverse they had suffered and their prolonged inability to revenge their fallen comrades, seized the opportunity and carried home the attack with spirited energy. For a time the bandits stood their ground, offering a stubborn resistance. The artillery shelled them out of their entrenchments, and the modern machine-guns and magazine rifles so swept them down when they ventured into the open, that at last they broke their ranks and fled in disorder. The Turks pursued and scattered their enemy to the four winds. The Bedouin losses were tremendous, and their ranks were cut up so completely, and their organisation was so crushed, that no further concerted action was taken to dispute the advance of the line to Mecca. Occasionally raids were made upon stations and completed sections, but such attacks were found to be attributable to independent, irresponsible units. Comparative tranquillity prevailed until the last division connecting the sacred cities with the Red Sea was taken in hand, and then one day the tribesmen made another raid, wiping out the whole of the constructional forces. When the line was commenced, H. Meissner Pasha, the enterprising German engineer selected to carry out the scheme, was given simply the two terminals of the line--Damascus and Mecca--roughly 1000 miles apart, and instructed to connect them by rail as best he could. It is to Meissner Pasha, therefore, that the full credit of carrying the line to success must be extended, for upon his shoulders fell the brunt of the work. He had to plot its path, had to be at the railhead to evolve a solution for a problem as it arose, and had to force his way through, over, or around obstacles as they confronted him. In this task he displayed considerable ingenuity and resource, while he appeared to be possessed of tireless energy. The handling of huge corps of men of varying nationalities--Turks, Montenegrins, Greeks, Cretans, Bedouins, and so on--was no simple matter in itself, but he possessed the happy faculty of infusing all who worked under him with his own enthusiasm and ambition to get the line completed in the shortest possible time. In addition to these duties of an essentially technical character, he had to attend to every want of his workmen. Every drop of water, every ounce of food, of stores, provisions, fuel and so forth had to be hauled over enormous distances, and in the depths of the desert the work of maintaining these supplies became stupendous. Owing to his splendid organisation, however, his most advanced outposts never once ran short of any of the necessaries of life.