With Kitchener to Khartum Author:George Warrington Steevens Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: end of it must be at Abu Hamed already—a vista of rails, sleepers, boxes, camels, and soldiers, and two turkeys, the property of a voluptuous Brigadier, bubbling... more » with indignation through the darkness. However she ran out smoothly enough towards midnight. We slept peacefully, four of us — the other made night hideous with kicks, and exhortations to visionary soldiers to fire low—and in the morning woke up rather less than a hundred miles on our way. But then the first hundred miles is all up-hill, though the gradient is nowhere difficult. The train ran beautifully, for while the surface sand is very easy to work it has a firm bottom, and the rails do not settle. All day we rumbled on prosperously, with no mischance more serious than a broken rail, and we crawled safely over that. Half the day we read and half the day we played cards, and when it grew dark we sang, for all the world like Thomas Atkins. Every now and then we varied the monotony with a meal; the train stopped frequently, and even when it did not the pace was slow enough for an agile butler to serve lunch by jumping off his truck and climbing on to the saloon foot-board. The scenery, it must be owned, was monotonous, and yet not without haunting beauty. Mile on mile, hour on hour, we glided through sheer desert. Yellow sand to right and left—now stretching away endlessly, now a valley between small broken hills. Sometimes the hills sloped away from us, then they closed in again. A DESERT SWINDON. 29 Now they were diaphanous blue on the horizon, now soft purple as we ran under their flanks. But always they were steeped through and through with sun — hazy, immobile, silent. It looked like a part of the world quite new, with none of the bloom rubbed off. It seemed almost profanity that I should be intruding on th...« less