CHAPTER L.
THE START FOR KHARTOUM.
'Elliot, can this be Jack Elliot?' exclaimed Dick Mostyn as he screwed an eyeglass into his left eye. 'By Jove, he looks as if he had a bad toothache! What's up, Jack—lost your heart to some fair Cairene on the Shoubrah road—eh?'
'Jack Elliot it is!' said Roland, as the officer in question, after 'handing over' his detachment, made his way to the quarters of the South Staffordshire, 'you are just in time to go up the river with us. We are on the eve of starting for Khartoum.'
'At last!'
'Yes, at last,' continued Roland, as they grasped each other's hands, and the latter, when looking intently into his brother-in-law's face, detected a grave, grim, keen-eyed, harassed, and even haggard expression, which was all unlike the jovial, free, and open one he was wont to see there. 'Why, Jack,' said he, 'what the devil is up? Are you ill with fever, or what? Did you leave all well at home?' he added as he drew him aside.
'Well—yes—I suppose; but ill or well, thereby hangs a tale—a devil of a tale; but ere I can tell it, give me something to drink, old fellow—my water-bottle is empty—flask ditto, and then I shall relate that which you would rather not hear.'
Jack unbuckled and flung his sword aside, while Roland hastily and impatiently supplied his wants, and then heard his brief, rapid, and startling story, winding up with the disappearance of Maude from the villa, and the incoherent and mysterious letter of farewell she left for him.
'After this—the deluge!' exclaimed Roland in the direst perplexity.
'God and my own heart only know what it cost me to start for the seat of war, leaving Maude, as I did, untraced, unfollowed, and undiscovered; but I had neither time nor an address to follow up,' sighed Elliot; 'and God only knows, too, how all this has cut her as it must have cut her—my poor darling—to the soul!'
The meeting of Roland and Jack Elliot was one of perplexity, gloom, and genuine distress. Far away from the land where they could be of help or use in unravelling the mystery, or succouring Maude, whom they deemed then a houseless fugitive, they felt themselves miserably powerless, hopeless, and exasperated; but curiously, perhaps, they never thought of suspecting the real author of the mischief, and were utterly at a loss to conceive how such a complication and accusation came about in any way.
Neither Jack nor Roland could know or conceive that she was safe under her uncle's wing at Merlwood. Thus they had to endure the anxiety of supposing her, with all her beauty, refinement, and delicacy, to be adrift in some homeless, aimless, and despairing way in London—haunted by anger and terror of an injury and irreparable wrong. The contemplation of this state of affairs filled the minds of both with incessant torture—a torture for which there was no relief, and would be none, either by letter or telegraph, for a long time, if ever, to them, as inexorably—in two days now—the regiment would be again on the Nile.
'Reason how we may,' was the ever-recurring and gloomy thought of Roland now, 'it has been said that Fate does certainly pursue some families to their ruin and extinction, and such is our probable end—the Lindsays of Earlshaugh!'
And so, apart from their brother officers, these two conversed and talked of the mysterious episode of the woman and her claims again and again, viewing it in every imaginable way, till they almost grew weary of it, in the hopelessness of elucidating it while in the Soudan; and as for poor Malcolm Skene and his fate, that was supposed to be a thing of the past, and they ceased to surmise about it.
At 2 p.m. on the 28th of December the start for Khartoum began!
It was made by the South Staffordshire, under the gallant Eyre, with exactly 19 officers and 527 men of the Regiment, and 2 officers and 20 men of the Royal Engineers in 50 boats, having the Staffordshire Knot painted on their bows, the badge of the old '38th.'
The sight was a fine and impressive one; the band was playing merrily in the leading boat, as usual, Scottish and Irish airs, as England, apparently, has none for any martial purpose. Thus it is that Scottish and Irish quicksteps are now ordered by the Horse Guards for nearly all the English regiments, with Highland reels for the Cavalry, and one other air in the 'Queen's Regulations,' with which we bid farewell to the old colours, is 'Auld Lang Syne.'
Steadily the whole battalion moved up stream, cheering joyously—the first away for Khartoum—exhibiting a regularity and power of stroke as they feathered their oars, and showing how much recent practice had done to convert them into able boatmen, and soon the camp was left behind, and the boats had the bare desert on both sides of the stream; but on and on they went, stemming the current of the famous Nile, famous even in the remotest ages, when the Egyptians worshipped the cow, the cat, the ibis, and the crocodile, and when King Amenchat, sixth of the Twelfth Dynasty, cut his huge river-like canal to join Lake M[oe]ris, 250 miles lower down.
On the 29th the Staffordshire boats were off the island of Massawi, where the atmosphere was grilling, being 120 degrees in the shade; but the soldiers were in the highest spirits, their regiment being the leading one of the whole army.
One scorching day followed another, yet on and on they toiled unwearyingly, passing Merawi and Abu Dom amid date-trees and rank, gigantic tropical vegetation, till the New Year's Day of 1885 found them nearing the foot of a cataract, after passing which the River Column was to form for its final advance on Khartoum. Already the uniforms were more than ever ragged, and scarcely a man had boots to his feet.
Roland and Elliot had command of different boats, so they could commune no more, even when they moored for the night by the river's bank, when the crimson sun had set in ruddy splendour beyond the gray hills of the Bayuda Desert, and the dingy yellow of the Nile was touched by the afterglow, in which its waves rippled in purple and silver sheen, while the dark, feathery palms and fronds swayed slowly to and fro in the friendly breeze, and the great pelicans were seen to wade amid the slime and ooze where the hideous crocodiles were dozing.
In some places the boats were rowed between islets which displayed a wondrous tropical wealth of dhurra, sugar-canes, and cotton-trees, with palms innumerable.
Officers and men—even chaplains—worked hard at the oars in their anxiety to get on. For days some never had the oar out of their hands; on others they were hauling the boats over the rapids and up cataracts, where at times they stuck in rocks and sandbanks, and had to be unloaded and lifted bodily off. At times the pulling was awful, and the hot sun scorched the back like fire, while the boats seemed to stand still in places where the main stream forced itself between masses of rock in a downward torrent, forming ugly whirlpools, about which the only certainty was, that whoever fell into them was drowned.
'Pull for your lives,' was then the cry; 'give way, men—give way with a will! Pull, or you'll be down the rapids.'
Then might be seen the men with their helmets off, bare-headed, and braving sunstroke under that merciless sunshine; steaming with perspiration—their teeth set hard—their hearts panting with the awful and, at times, apparently hopeless exertion of pulling against that mighty barrier of downward rolling water against which they seemed to make no head; yet ever and anon the cry went up:
'Pull, my lads, cheerily—we'll shake hands with old Gordon yet!'
And so they toiled on—now up to their knees in mud, now up to their chins in water, in rags and tatters, their blistered and festered hands swathed in dirty linen bandages, officers and men alike; often hungry, ever thirsty and weary, yet strong in heart and high in impulse, as our soldiers ever are when face to face with difficulty or death.
Then a little breeze might catch the sails, carry the boats ahead, and then a cheer of satisfaction would make the welkin ring.
Incredible was the amount of skill, care, and toil requisite for getting the boats of the flotilla up the Nile, especially at these places where with terrible force the rapids came in one sheet of foam, with a ceaseless roar between narrow walls of black rock at a visible incline, while at times the yells of thousands of wondering natives on the banks lent a strange and thrilling interest to the scene.
'At low Nile,' says a writer, 'these rapids are wild and desolate archipelagos, usually at least one or two miles in length, while the river bank on either side presents a series of broken, precipitous, and often inaccessible cliffs and rugged spurs. Their sombre and gloomy appearance is heightened by the colour of the rock, which, between high and low water-mark, is usually of a jet hue, and in many places so polished by the long action of the water, that it has the appearance of being carefully black-leaded. One or two big-winged, dusky birds may suddenly flap across, with a harsh, uncanny cry, or some small boy, whose tailor's bills must trouble him little, looks up from his fish-trap and shrieks for backsheesh; but beyond these, and the ceaseless rush of the water, sound or sight there is none.'
Many of these islets are submerged at high Nile, creating a number of cross currents which vary with the depth of the water, and render navigation difficult to all, and impossible to those who are unacquainted with each special locality; thus the troops of the relieving column had before them such a task as even Britons scarcely ever encountered before; but the Canadians, under Colonel Kennedy, of the Ontario Militia; the Indians, under the great chief White Eagle, and the soldiers, all worked splendidly together.
The 3rd of January saw the Staffordshire reach the Bivouac of Handab, in a wild and rocky spot, and in a position of peril between two great bodies of the enemy; but cheerily the soldiers joined in the queer chorus of a doggerel Canadian boat song adapted to the occasion by the Indians, who, whilom, had made the poplar groves of the Red River and Lake Winnipeg echo to it—
'Pulley up the boat, boys, rolley up the sleeve,
Khartoum am a long way to trabbel!
Pulley up the boat, boys, rolley up the sleeve,
Khartoum am a long way to trabbel, I believe!'