The Engineer officers displayed qualities of tact and temper:
their director was cool and indefatigable. Over all the Sirdar exercised
a regular control. Usually ungracious, rarely impatient, never
unreasonable, he moved among the workshops and about the line, satisfying
himself that all was proceeding with economy and despatch. The sympathy of
common labour won him the affection of the subalterns. Nowhere in the
Soudan was he better known than on the railroad. Nowhere was he
so ardently believed in.
It is now necessary to anticipate the course of events. As soon as the
railway reached Abu Hamed, General Hunter's force, which was holding that
place, dropped its slender camel communications with Merawi and drew its
supplies along the new line direct from Wady Halfa. After the completion of
the desert line there was still left seventeen miles of material for
construction, and the railway was consequently at once extended to Dakhesh,
sixteen miles south of Abu Hamed. Meanwhile Berber was seized, and military
considerations compelled the concentration of a larger force to maintain
that town. The four battalions which had remained at Merawi were floated
down stream to Kerma, and, there entraining, were carried by Halfa and
Abu Hamed to Dakhesh - a journey of 450 miles.
When the railway had been begun across the desert, it was believed that
the Nile was always navigable above Abu Hamed. In former campaigns it had
been reconnoitred and the waterway declared clear. But as the river fell
it became evident that this was untrue. With the subsidence of the waters
cataracts began to appear, and to avoid these it became necessary first of
all to extend the railway to Bashtinab, later on to Abadia, and finally to
the Atbara. To do this more money had to be obtained, and the usual
financial difficulties presented themselves. Finally, however, the matter
was settled, and the extension began at the rate of about a mile a day.
The character of the country varies considerably between Abu Hamed and the
Atbara River. For the first sixty miles the line ran beside the Nile,
at the edge of the riparian belt. On the right was the cultivable though
mostly uncultivated strip, long neglected and silted up with fine sand
drifted into dunes, from which scattered, scraggy dom palms and prickly
mimosa bushes grew. Between the branches of these sombre trees the river
gleamed, a cool and attractive flood. On the left was the desert, here
broken by frequent rocks and dry watercourses. From Bashtinab to Abadia
another desert section of fifty miles was necessary to avoid some very
difficult ground by the Nile bank. From Abadia to the Atbara the last
stretch of the line runs across a broad alluvial expanse from whose surface
plane-trees of mean appearance, but affording welcome shade, rise, watered
by the autumn rains. The fact that the railway was approaching regions
where rain is not an almost unknown phenomenon increased the labour of
construction.
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