THE TROOPS IN THE SOUDAN.

New Zealand Mail, Issue 1288, 5 November 1896, Page 37

THE TROOPS IN THE SOUDAN.

London, October 30. Tne troops in Suakin return next month Caiko, November 1.

There is wholesale submission of the Sheiks between Dongola, Berber and Omdurman, and the Khalifa dreads a general revolt among his followers.

Some little time since we gave some idea of tho mode adopted for making the sparG time of the mon pass pleasantly in their campaign in the desert. Here is the reverse of the medal, from the special correspondent of the London Times : —lt was an exceedingly hot and oppressive day, and at night, shortly after wo had lain down to sleep in tho open under the star-lit sky—in this climate no one passes the night in tent or tokul —the sand storm came down upon us. Suddenly the j stars went out and it became pitch dark; the burning wind, blowing with the strength of a full gale, drove j before it whirling masses of sand which compelled us to roll our blankets round our heads to avoid suffocation. Then followed 1 the thunder and the drenching rain, which 1 covered us with mud. When the w r ind first struck us it snatched up our clothes which were lying boside us and carried them away with it into the desert. At dawn tho bo-

draggled correspondents were searching all the neighbouring gullies for missing articles of attire, and soldiers came in from the outposts with our shirts, cummerbunds', and other garments—damp, mud-covered, and torn by rocks and thorns —whose wild career they had intercepted some miles out of camp. Most of our property was thus recovered : hut one of our artists still mourns the loss of anew pair of riding breeches. 1 see that an English newspaper facetiously alludes to this campaign as a sort of Sunday school picnic. If the gentleman who sits at home in ease to write this (in no danger from cholera, dysentery and enteric fever) had passed the last three weeks in Kosheh camp, he would, I imagine, have found it anything but a comfortable picnic. He would soon have wearied of the intense heat, the choking dust storms alternating with tains of mud, and tiie plagues ol foul flies, not to mention the rats, scorpions and large poisonous spiders which now swarm in all our huts.