THE NILE EXPEDITION.

Poverty Bay Herald, Volume XXIV, Issue 8054, 1 November 1897, Page 4

THE NILE EXPEDITION.

WITH THE EGYPTIAN TROOPS.

The Times' correspondent, writing from Wady Haifa on August 26th, says that the railway between Wady ' Haifa and Abu Hamed, now in course of construction, is from several points of view one of the most interesting military lines in the world. For one thing, it crosses a portion of the Nubian desert which has apparently never before been trodden by the feet of man. In one place, however, it runs across what seems to have been the route taken a long time ago by a large body of men ; for here, 60 miles from the nearest water, the engineers came across a mysterious collection of many hundreds of broken zters, or earthen waler-

coolers ; they ' were two-handled, graceful _ amphorae of a shape unknown in modern Egypt. This discovery naturally started a good deal of conjecture. Some remembered that Cambyses sent an army across this desert ; then, to come down to more modern times, Ismail Pasha once despatched a force of 2000 men to Abu Hamed, which entirely disappeared in the desert and was never heard of again ; Said Pasha, too, travelled in luxurious state to Abu Hamed in a carriage drawn by eight camels, with an army watering the desert in front of him to keep down the dust. The Cambyses theory as to the origin of these zeers is at present the most favored, as carrying us back to a respectable antiquity. There is yet another and a not unlikely explanation. There are numerous traces of ancient gold diggings in the desert ; do these broken vessels mark the spot where these diggers of old, of whom the Arabs have preserved no traditions, had one of their mining camps ? Describing a trip to the end of the lina, the correspondent says :— -When darkness fell we were well out in the desert, and, therefore, in a far more pleasant climate than that of the Nile bank, witli its damp heat. Here the air was dry, pure, and deliciously cool ; it became even cold before dawn ; one often needs three blankets to cover one at night at the summit of the line ; here, too, we escape for a time the everirritating Egyptian flies. Even the air of mid-ocean is not more sweet and invigorating than that of the wind-swept, open desert, where, say the Arabs, the only diseases are hunger and thirst. So healthy, indeed, is it here that out of 2000 men working hard day after day in the sun on the railway construction there are rarely more than 12 on the sick list; anil accidents account, for the majority of these cases. It is noticed, by the way, that the men put on this work, receiving, as they do, regular and wholesome .rations, rapidly improve in physique, increasing in size and weight to a remarkable extent. They all, both yellow Egyptians and coal-black Soudanese, appeared to be in the best of spirits. These people have a ■ great capacity for railway construction, and seem to thoroughly enjoy their work. Of thecheery, ever-griuningSoudanese, numbers were Dervishes but a few months since fighting against us ; and some were still wearing the jibbeht or'Mahdist uniforms from which the colored patches had been torn off. One black ex-Dervish worthy of mention is Somid, the Soudanese jester of the camp, who can always raise a roar of laughter in the working gangs, and is of distinct service, keeping up the men's spirits, as he does, by his clever mimicry and queer tricks. A bugler in Hicks Pasha's ill-fated army, he was captured by the Dervishes and taken to the Mahdi's camp at Omdurman. There he discovered that he could make his life easier by playing the buffoon, and he became the je3ter of Wad el Bishara, the famous Emir who commanded the Dervisli forces that were opposed to us last year. He used to be called up to amuse his master's friends by giving imitations of the British officers with whom he had been in contact. Recaptured by us last year at the battle of Halir, he now, when not employed in rail-laying, keeps the camp in a roar by his close imitations of his former master Bishara and other Dervin.li notables.