# From Cairo to the Soudan Frontier/Chapter 12

CHAPTER XII
A BREAKWATER OF BARBARISM
It is a pretty and peaceful-looking riverside settlement which meets the eye of the traveller up the Nile as he approaches Wady Haifa. A little group of houses, at which the steamer stops to deliver letters, and which has sprung up during the last few years under the protecting shadow of the British garrison, forms his first halting-place; in another ten minutes he has rounded the point behind which lies the military station proper and draws up at the landing-stage hard by the headquarters of the Commandant. A flag flying over the roof of a bungalow surrounded by a garden rich with palms, lebbek and poinsettia, denotes the spot, and but for these signs of tropical ​vegetation it might be a sequestered villa on the Upper Thames. A little flight of half a dozen steps leading up to and through its shrubberies from the waters edge to the entrance contributes to the support of the illusion. Some few hundred yards down the river you have passed another long, low building, set parallel instead of transversely to the river, which you judge, and rightly so, to be the officers' mess-room. Otherwise, there is nothing to show that you have reached a frontier "stronghold" of Egypt.
The place effectually hides its military character from this point of approach. It turns its warlike face away from the river and towards the desert, and looks out only with the air of a smiling village over the broad and tranquil Nile. Yet this is Wady Haifa, the finger-tip, so to speak, of the arm of British protective power in Egypt, and as true a breakwater of barbarism as any that is to be found on the face of the globe. For here, to every pacific and law-abiding ​cultivator of the soil within the Khedive's dominion—here is the limit of peace, order, and security in the Nile Valley: beyond is chaos. South of this position, or, at any rate, south of that more southward zone which a salutary fear of the Haifa garrison and its patrols keeps clear of the marauder, lies a country tenanted or scoured by tribes whose business is robbery and whose pastime murder, and who seek nothing better than a chance such as they found made for themselves the other day at Atandan, of swooping down on a defenceless village, slaying as many of its inhabitants as they come across, and making off with as much booty as they can lay their hands upon. Against these desert wolves there is nothing but the British soldier-shepherd to protect the Egyptian peasant-sheep, and very vigilant, very rarely evaded, that protection is.
It is not many weeks, however, since these prowling ravagers slipped within the line of our guard—if that shadowy cordon, which, ​of course, it is impossible to stretch along so many miles of river, can properly or fairly be so called—and very evident is the natural soreness displayed by our genial hosts at the recollection of the incident. Their feeling on the subject is eminently characteristic, and well brings out the everlasting contrast between Oriental apathy and the strenuous energy of the West. The task which has been set to these British officers—that of policing some two hundred miles of absolutely exposed river-bank from two stations, one at each end of the line—is an impracticable one, and they know it. Yet they devote themselves to it with a cheerful and untiring activity which refreshes one to witness, and they are far more restless under occasional illustrations of its impossibility than the people who suffer from the fact. If ever there were a case when the "Kismet" which amply satisfies the victims of a robber raid in these regions might do consolation-duty for their baffled protectors it is that of ​the descent on the village of Atandan. Yet our officers at Wady Haifa are quite unable to take that view of the incident. They discussed it freely enough, and with a frank military admiration mingling with their disgust.
"It was really not half a bad performance for dervishes," said the staff officer, with whom we were conversing about it. "They came from a distance of over a hundred miles, and across a country without wells, and they got safe back again with their booty, and without losing a man. Yes, it was a very well organised and well executed piece of work."
"How long did it take them to sack the unfortunate village?"
"Well, that would only be a work of two or three hours; but it was getting back on to their own ground, and beyond the risk of our cutting them off—it was that which was the difficulty."
"They cut the telegraph wires, didn't they?"
​"Oh, yes, of course. They always commence operations in that way. But still they wouldn't have got anything like so long a start as they did if it had not been for the villagers themselves. The fellows who were despatched to this place to give us information of the raid actually put up for the night on their way here, and we didn't get the news till the next morning. What can you do with a people so 'casual' as that?"
It did seem a little easy-going, to be sure. One tried to imagine the Malise of Scott's poem stopping at a Highland inn, interrupting his wild career through the glens, with "danger, death, and deadly deed" behind him, for a cosy supper and a bed.
When the messengers did at last arrive the troops of the garrison were, it seems, engaged in manœuvring—"Egyptian Army resisting an attack of Dervishes," being the order of the day's programme, and a droll misunderstanding occurred. "The Dervishes have captured a village, sir," was the ​breathless announcement made to the commanding officer watching the evolutions of the combatants; and "All right" was the natural reply. "So much the better for the officer in command of them." It was, of course, some little time before the two armies could be generally apprised of the fact that it was a question of real and not of sham Dervishes, and that they must unite forces in pursuit of the common enemy, who, thanks to the leisurely proceedings of the villagers, were by that time well on their way back to their base of operations.
"It was too many hours' start to give the rascals," said our informant, regretfully.
We expressed the surprise of ignorance at its being possible to give them any start at all. Surely a tribe whose business is "robbery under arms," would be as well mounted as a clan of Border-reivers in the old cattle-lifting days. The camels of a band of raiding Dervishes ought to be a match for any others.
"Wait till you have seen ours," replied ​our friend, with a smile. "Our camel-corps are mounted on the finest animals to be obtained anywhere in the African desert. In fact, most people who come to Egypt don't really know what a camel is, and is capable of, until they have paid us a visit. There is as much difference between a cavalry camel of the first quality and the unkempt and ungainly brutes that shamble backwards and forwards between the Pyramids and the Mena House Hotel as there is between a cart-horse and a thoroughbred. But look! Here come some of the camel-corps back from exercise. We have not got such a good show to-day as we should have liked to give you, but you can almost see the difference in their way of 'going,' even at this distance."
Under a dense cloud of the desert dust two considerable detachments of camel-cavalry were seen approaching us at the trot, which by the time they had got abreast of us had slackened into a walk. Truly, there was no exaggeration in the praises to ​which we had been listening. The difference between what may be called the camel of commerce and this humped charger was immense, astonishing, to any one who has not seen it almost incredible. It was the difference between a slouching, morose, and ragged street loafer and the same man set up and smartened into the well-drilled soldier of a crack regiment. The camel of commerce, as we most of us know him, is a coarse-haired, untidy brute, knock-kneed and awkward-gaited, with a sullen, if not vindictive, expression of countenance, and a coat all tags and tufts. But these were clean-limbed and comely creatures, with skins that shone like satin in the evening sun. They carried their heads as if they were proud of them, and planted their feet with neatness and precision, keeping step as perfectly as the chargers of a troop of cavalry. Merely to see them walk was enough to dispel all doubts as to their ability to ourstrip any animal that a Dervish is likely to be ​bestriding. And as for drill and discipline, we soon have an opportunity of judging of their efficiency in those respects when we follow our guide to the camping-ground and see scores of these usually unmanageable animals kneeling down in long rows at the word of command before the shallow trenches in which the men have placed for them their evening meal.
"We keep a detachment of the Camel Corps in a condition to take the field, you might almost say, at a moment's notice," another officer told us. "Rations for the men, forage for the beasts, arms and ammunition—everything in constant readiness. In less than half an hour after the order was given they would be on the march."
We looked along the lines of crouching and feeding camels, with their sturdy, sable Soudanese riders standing motionless behind them—the picture of organised efficiency—and we could well understand the present inclination of the Dervishes to give ​them as wide a berth as possible. The Khalifa's followers have had lessons in that wisdom since the severe one which they received at Toski in 1889. A year or two ago the country around Wady Haifa was alive with them, and though they never actually attacked our position, they had the audacity to threaten it. But since then they have been so effectually cleared out that this sudden excursion upon a Nubian village well to the north of the frontier which we defend was a peculiarly irritating surprise. It is the more so because, for political and other reasons, reprisals are out of the question.
"The watch-dog," observed one of our officers, with some bitterness, "is, unfortunately, tied. He is allowed to go only to the length of his chain, and then he is pulled up."
Obviously, therefore, if the thief can only get start enough to save his calves he gets off scot free. Yet, on the other hand, ​one sees the futility of any temporary slipping of the collar. The watch-dog sees it himself. There would not be the slightest difficulty in chastising the perpetrators of this raid by a descent upon the district from which they came. But what would be the use? "We should probably kill 5 per cent. of the men who were concerned in it," observed a high official of the Intelligence Department, "and 95 per cent. of people who have no more to do with it than you or I." There is nothing to be done but to keep "pegging away" at patrol work, and trust to catching the Dervishes in the very act on their next attempt. It may not be long before the opportunity occurs, for the Dervishes, one hears, are full of elation at their recent success. They could hardly be "more cock-a-whoop," one of our friends puts in, "if they had sacked Cairo." They are boasting, it is believed, that it takes the camel corps of the fnfidels six hours to mobilise. It is the eager hope of every man in the garrison of Wady ​Haifa that they will soon test the accuracy of this calculation.
In talk of this kind the golden afternoon wears away in a still, starry, tropical night. Dinner awaits us at the hospitable mess-room looking over the moon-lit Nile, and it is time to bring our walk through the camp to a close. To-morrow we set our faces to the north once more, and leave behind us this furthest outpost of civilisation in Northern Africa, with its garrison of stalwart blacks, and their cheery young English officers, keeping inviolate the Pax Britannica, even as their spiritual fathers in history kept the Roman Peace on those distant barriers of their empire against which, until the day of its decline, the insurging tides of barbarism beat so long in vain.