CHAPTER LVII.
THE SICK CONVOY.
Repeatedly Jack Elliot thanked Heaven that his comrades in the regiment had not got hold of his wretched story—that he and his young wife had quarrelled—were actually separated, and that she had run away from him because of some other woman, as he knew well that but garbled versions of the comedies or tragedies in the lives of our friends generally reach us.
The movements of the column were now so abrupt, and, for a time, undecided, that no telegram in reply to his message reached Roland from Edinburgh, and ere long he had a new source of anxiety.
Enteric fever, that ailment which proved so fatal to many of our troops during this disastrous and useless war, fastened upon poor Jack Elliot, and the column had barely reached the camp at Korti when he was 'down' with it, as the soldiers phrased it, and very seriously so—all the more seriously, no doubt, that the tenor of Mr. M'Wadsett's postscript left such a doubt on his mind as to the plans and movements of Maude.
His head felt as if weighted with lead—but hot lead; he had an appalling thirst, and was destitute of all appetite even for delicacies, and the latter were not plentiful, certainly, in our camp at Korti.
If he survived, which he thought was almost impossible, he believed that he could never, never forget what he endured in the so-called camp there—first, the languor and disinclination for work, duty, exercise, even for thinking; the pains in his limbs; his dry, brown tongue, that rattled in his mouth; mental and bodily debility; and all the other signs of his ailment, produced by exposure, by midnight dew, and the bad, brackish water of the desert.
Roland—of a hardier nature, perhaps—was unwearying in his care of him, and thrice daily with his own hands gave him the odious prescribed draught—hydrochloric acid, tincture of orange, and so forth, diluted in Nile water—while the once strong, active, and muscular Jack was weak as a baby.
Roland greatly feared he would die on his hands, and hailed with intense satisfaction an order by which he was personally detailed to take a detachment of certain sick and wounded, including Jack Elliot, down the Nile to Lower Egypt.
In his tent, he was roused from an uneasy dream that he was again lying at the bottom of the Kelpie's Cleugh at Earlshaugh, by an orderly sergeant, who brought him this welcome command about dawn, and noon saw him, with a small flotilla of boats freighted with pain and suffering, take his leave of the South Staffordshire and begin his journey down the Nile, viâ New Dongola, the cataracts at Ambigol and elsewhere, by Wady-Halfa and other points where temporary hospitals or halting-places were established.
Day by day the boats with their melancholy loads, sometimes by oars, at others with canvas set, had dropped down the Nile between barren shores overlooked by wild and sterile mountains, where the sick were almost stunned occasionally by the harsh yells of the watchful Arabs echoing from rocks and caves! and, after turning a sharp angle, Roland suddenly saw the island of Phite, with all its numerous temples, before his flotilla, and as there was a considerable flood in the river the cataract there became a source of anxiety to him, and rather abated the interest with which he might otherwise have surveyed the scene around him.
'Shellal! Shellal!' (the Cataract! the Cataract!) he heard the yells of the naked Arabs, who hovered on the banks expecting a catastrophe, which they would have beheld with savage joy.
The soldiers held their breath and hung on their suspended oars, the blades of which dripped and flashed like gold in the sheen of the setting sun; yet the boats glided down the foaming rapid without a sound other than the rush of the water; then came a sudden calm, an amazing combination of light and colour on shore, and isle, and stream, with the rays of the moon, in the blue zenith, conflicting with those of the sun at the horizon.
'On either side,' wrote one who was there, 'walls of overhanging rock shut in the river, standing in pious guardianship around the sacred isle. Beneath their frowning blackness lapped and flowed a shining expanse of water stained with crimson in the sunset's glow, in which a line of tall and plumy palms were bending in the wind; to the east, the Libyan sands poured in a golden stream through every cleft and fissure in the darkling hills; and overhead, and all about, floated a splendour of reddening fire. From their station they seemed to look straight into the very heart of the sunset when all the west had burst into sudden flames of fire. The freshening wind tossed them in uncertain rise and fall; the melancholy sound of the distant cataract, and now and then the cry of some night bird cut sharply through the stillness of the hour. An immense sense of loneliness brooded over the empty temples and adjacent isles abandoned by their forgotten gods, whose sculptured faces gazed mournfully out from the crumbling walls, then flushed with the supreme splendour of the dying day.
A few miles further down, the Isle of Flowers, with all its wondrous vegetation, and the many black rocks of Assouan rising from a medley of dust, Roman ruins and feathery palms were left astern; and of the long, long downward journey some 450 miles were mastered, after which lay nearly the same distance to Cairo.
Often had the boats to pause in their downward way, while the melancholy duty was performed of burying those whose journey in life was over, by the river bank, uncoffined, in nameless and unrecorded graves, where the ibis stalks among the tall reeds, and the scaly crocodile dozes amid the ooze.
And as the boat in which he lay under an awning glided down the Nile Jack Elliot was often in a species of stupor, and muttered at times of his boyish days at the High School of Edinburgh; of the brawling Tweed when he had been wont to fish at Braidielee; of matches at Aldershot, and clearing the hurdles in the Long Valley; but he was most often a boy, a lad again in his fevered dreams, and seeking birds' nests among the bonnie Lammermuirs, feeling the pleasant breeze that came over the braes of the Merse, while the sun shone on the pools and thickets of the Eye and the Leader; but of Maude, strange to say, or their mysterious separation, no word escaped him, till he became conscious, and then Roland would hear him muttering as he kissed her photo:
'Where are you, my darling? Shall I ever look upon your face again?'
And with a wasted and trembling hand he would consign the soft leather case to the breast of his tattered and faded tunic. He was so weak, so utterly debilitated that sometimes he shed involuntary tears—a sight that filled Roland with infinite pity and commiseration, and a dread each day that he might have to leave Jack, as he had left others, in a lonely tomb by the river-side.
Jack, poor fellow, was dwelling generally in a land of shadows; familiar scenes and faces came and receded, and loved voices came and sank curiously in his ear, while his apparently dying eyes and lips pled vainly for one kiss of his sunny-haired Maude to sweeten the bitter draught of that death which seemed so close and nigh.
But he was still struggling between life and eternity, when in the ruddy haze Roland hailed the purple outlines of the Pyramids in the Plain of Ghizeh, the ridge of the Jebel Mokattam, the distant minarets and the magnificent citadel of Cairo.
On reaching the Kasr-el-Nil Barracks, Roland was ordered to be attached for duty purposes to a regiment quartered there till further orders, as no more troops were proceeding up the Nile.
Though the battle of Hasheen was to be fought and won, and the lamentable fiasco of Macneill's zereba to occur at Suakim, the war was deemed virtually over, as the cause for it had collapsed by Gordon's betrayal and the fall of Khartoum.
With the general advance of the expedition under Lord Wolseley to rescue Gordon, our story has only had a certain connection—a mission undertaken far too late, but during which the mind at home was kept at fever-heat by news from that burning seat of strife, recording the sufferings of our soldiers, and the bloody but victorious battles with the Mahdists, till the dark and terrible tidings came, that just as Wilson's column was ready to join Gordon, who had sent his steamers to Metemneh to meet him—Khartoum, after a defence perhaps unsurpassed in the annals of peril and glory, had fallen by storm and treachery, and the people of Britain were left to wonder, and in doubt, whether a stupendous blunder or an unpardonable crime had been perpetrated.