'What is the name of the next station out from
here?'
'Station Number One,' said a ghost.
'And the next?'
'Station Number Two, and so on to Eight, I think.'
'And wasn't it worth while to name even one of these stations from
some man, living or dead, who had something to do with making the line?'
'Well, they didn't, anyhow,' said another ghost. 'I suppose they didn't
think it worth while. Why? What do you think?'
'I think, I replied, 'it is the sort of snobbery that nations go to
Hades for.'
Her headlight showed at last, an immense distance off; the economic
electrics were turned up, the ghosts vanished, the dragomans of the
various steamers flowed forward in beautiful garments to meet their
passengers who had booked passages in the Cook boats, and the Khartoum
train decanted a joyous collection of folk, all decorated with horns,
hoofs, skins, hides, knives, and assegais, which they had been buying at
Omdurman. And when the porters laid hold upon their bristling bundles,
it was like MacNeill's Zareba without the camels.
Two young men in tarboushes were the only people who had no part in the
riot. Said one of them to the other:
'Hullo?'
Said the other: 'Hullo!'
They grunted together for a while. Then one pleasantly:
'Oh, I'm sorry for that! I thought I was going to have you under me
for a bit. Then you'll use the rest-house there?'
'I suppose so,' said the other. 'Do you happen to know if the roof's
on?'
Here a woman wailed aloud for her dervish spear which had gone adrift,
and I shall never know, except from the back pages of the Soudan
Almanack, what state that rest-house there is in.
The Soudan Administration, by the little I heard, is a queer service. It
extends itself in silence from the edges of Abyssinia to the swamps of
the Equator at an average pressure of one white man to several thousand
square miles. It legislates according to the custom of the tribe where
possible, and on the common sense of the moment when there is no
precedent. It is recruited almost wholly from the army, armed chiefly
with binoculars, and enjoys a death-rate a little lower than its own
reputation. It is said to be the only service in which a man taking
leave is explicitly recommended to get out of the country and rest
himself that he may return the more fit to his job. A high standard of
intelligence is required, and lapses are not overlooked. For instance,
one man on leave in London took the wrong train from Boulogne, and
instead of going to Paris, which, of course, he had intended, found
himself at a station called Kirk Kilissie or Adrianople West, where he
stayed for some weeks.
