W. could not spare the time for lotus-eating under sail, so a "stern-wheeler" towed us from Philæ to Wady Halfa. It took very little away from the romance, and the steady progress was very grateful. On that glassy river, as it was now, we would have been an age getting to our goal.
I was greatly struck with Korosko, a place which, besides its natural desolate and most strange appearance, was sad with memories of Gordon. This was his starting-point as he left the Nile to travel across the desert to Khartoum, never to return. From a height one can see the black and grey burnt-up landscape which lonely Gordon traversed. It is a most repellent tract of desert just there, calcined and blasted. A view I had of the Nile, southward, from the mountains of Thebes one day, though bathed in sunshine, has remained most melancholy in my mind, because, looking towards Khartoum, I thought of the hundreds of my countrymen who lay buried in already obliterated graves all along those lonely banks, away, away to the remote horizon and beyond, sacrificed to the achievement of a great disaster. Others like them have arisen since and will arise, eager to offer their lives for success or failure, honours or a nameless grave.
One evening, as the "_Fostât_," in tow, was skimming through the calm water with a rippling sound, and we were all sitting on deck, W. described to us so vividly a memorable night before the fight that put a stop to hostilities, that I could see the whole scene as though I had been there. They were out in the desert, the moon was full; the Dervishes were "sniping" at long range, when afar off was heard a Highland "lament." The "sniping" ceased all along the enemy's line and dead silence fell upon the night but for the wail of the bagpipes. The Dervishes seemed to be listening. The "lament" increased in sound, and presently the Cameron Highlanders approached, bearing, under the Union Jack, the body of an officer who had died that day of fever, to add yet another grave to the number that lay at intervals along the shores of the great river. You should hear the pipes in the desert, as well as on the mountain-side, to understand them.
"Every phase of the day and night" (letter, 12th January '86), "appeals to me on the Nile, not forgetting those few moments that follow the after-glow which are like the last sigh of the dying day. The delicacy of those pure tints is such that one scarcely dares to handle them in writing. Evening after evening I have watched by the desert death-bed of the day, looking eastward so as to have the light upon the hills.