Chapter XIX: In the Land of the Pharaohs

Ismailia, by the Lake of Timsah, lay steeped in sunshine, while the regiments of the Highland Brigade, for the second time, after the lapse of eighty years, landed upon Egyptian soil again.

Built equi-distant from Port Said and Suez, this new town protects the outlet of the second canal, which carries the supply of fresh water from the Nile near Cairo to the Isthmus. In 1862 the place where it stands was a scene of sandy desolation. Seven years later saw a brilliant little French town in existence with a broad quay, bordering the lake, with hotels, cafés, a theatre where vaudevilles were acted, a street of well-stocked shops, a public garden with a fountain spouting Nile water in the Place Champollion, the telegraph wires overhead, and the bells of a Christian church ringing, where, but a short time before, the wandering Bedouin, the nomadic dweller in tents, the child of the desert, with glittering spear and floating burnous, urged his camel on its solitary way from Ramses to Serapium.

The heat was intense, and to the eyes of the Scottish mountaineers the scenery about Ismailia seemed intensely monotonous. Cloudless skies of the deepest and richest blue formed a contrast to the vast expanse of yellow sand that stretched far, far away till lost in hazy distance, but the desert is susceptible of many shades and changes of colour.

It is said that at Ismailia the stranger can very fully realise the purity, the balm, and beauty of the Egyptian night, especially if seated over wine and a cigar in the Hôtel des Voyageurs, where he may watch the Lake of Timsah, and so varied are the tints of the latter in the light of the red sun setting in the west, amid a lurid glow of gold and crimson, that it looks like three lakes; towards the canal that leads to Serapium it seems a deep blue; where the ships are grouped near Ismailia, its wavelets seem silver with gold, while the moon comes slowly up like a silver dawn, and rosy tints yet linger when the sun has gone abruptly down.

But no time was given to the Highlanders either to study scenery or artistic effects, even if so disposed. Each regiment was rapidly formed in column--every officer and man in his fighting kit, with tropical helmet, haversack, and water bottle; the men with their valises and greatcoats, and the march began towards the desert where the Egyptians of Arabi awaited them at Tel-el-Kebir.

Little was talked of then but the recent cavalry fight at Kassassin, where our Life Guards swept the ranks of Arabi's infantry, and where a horde of wild Bedouins, who had been hovering near the field like birds of prey, after their departure poured in to strip and rob the dead and wounded of both armies, killing all who were able to resist.

The mess--or regiment rather, as there was no mess now--saw that Allan Graham had come back a sorely changed man, who had hours of evident depression alternated by furious hilarity--not the man's old style at all; but his world, like Hamlet's, was 'out of joint.' The conduct of Olive Raymond yet remained a profound, an unexplained and exasperating mystery to him; but he felt, how bitterly, that love lives even after trust and faith are dead and buried; and now that he was so far, far away from her, dreams of a yearning and sorrowful kind, with many stinging thoughts, that he feared would never leave him, filled his mind as he marched at the head of his company towards the darkening desert.

In his looks and manner, Evan Cameron, like others, read a marked yet undefinable change; his bearing now was occasionally haughty and reserved; at other times his eyes seemed strangely sad. What could have happened? Cameron did not ask, and as yet Allan said nothing about it; and, sooth to say, in his own thoughts of Eveline, the former had cause to be sad enough too.

His memories were ever of the days at Dundargue, and the chance parting in the belvidere at Maviswood; and again her kisses, the touch of her little caressing hands, with her voice came vividly to him.

In some of the last papers that had reached the transport, _viâ_ the Continent, he could see that she was leading a life of outward gaiety. Could he doubt that it was otherwise than outward? He gathered a sombre satisfaction from the thought, and then strove to set it aside as selfish.

Why should she not enjoy balls and flowers-shows, races and regattas, the drawing-room at Buckingham Palace, and other brilliant gatherings? Yet as he read of these things a frown of mingled anger, sorrow, and even mockery gathered on his brow in spite of himself.

In the same papers Allan could discover no trace of any body having been cast upon the beach either at Southsea or the shore of the Isle of Wight, and hence he supposed that the remains of the drowned Holcroft must have been taken out to sea.

The Highland enthusiasm, the warlike spirit that blazed up within him, kept him from a great despair, for latterly his love for Olive had become a part of his own existence.

The novelty of the land in which our new campaign had opened, the incessant watchfulness, the time and attention each duty brought with it, all gave him a recklessness as to life and as to fear of death, that after a time won him the involuntary admiration of the Black Watch and the whole Highland Brigade.

Just as the sun set, the bugles sounded a 'halt' after a march of six miles, but six terrible miles they were, for at every step the Highlanders sank ankle-deep in the soft and sun-dried sand.

All around that halting-place a sea of the latter seemed to stretch in every direction, bare and desolate, save where Ismailia lay, its edifices looking inky, black, and opaque in outline against the orange and primrose sky; and black looked the masts of the transports as they rose like a forest amid the waters of the Lake of Timsah.

When the first bivouac was formed at El-Magfar, the bare-kneed Highlanders, each rolled in his blanket on the soft sand, slept comfortably enough; but with morning came the first instalment of misery, when the heavy dew that soaks everything left them cold and stiff, and longing even for the fierce unclouded sun again.

'A devil of a country this,' said Carslogie. 'By day it is too hot to eat, to act, or even to think; and at night it is too cold to sleep or think of anything but the bitter cold itself.'

And but for the hot tea made for all over-night, when the brigade first came to its camping-place, some injury to health must have ensued; but the men were too weary to eat even a biscuit, of which each carried a two days' supply in the canvas haversack that formed his only pillow.

Before the sun was up, Allan rose from the sand and looked about him. Under the starlight the Highland bivouac--for camp it was not--presented a curious sight, as the men lay in ranks, each rolled in his blanket, beside the piles of arms; the sentinels of the out-piquets on the way to Tel-el-Mahuta standing dark and motionless against the blue of the sky, looking in kilt and helmet like the statues of ancient Romans.

To get a little warmth ere the pipers blew the 'rouse,' he walked a short distance from where the men of his company lay, and near a fragment of ruined wall, beside which grew a patch of those prickly plants (round which hillocks of sand occasionally gather), and a solitary gum-tree grew, he found, rolled up in a burnous, and evidently concealing himself in dread and fear, a Bedouin. There was a small palm-grove near Magfar; why did he not seek hiding there?

'Hallo, my man,' thought Allan, 'what are you lurking here for?--mischief, no doubt.'

He drew his claymore, supposing the lurker could be but a spy who had crept within our chain of sentries; but the wild son of the desert raised his hands deprecatingly, and, opening his burnous, showed that he was perishing from a dreadful wound--a sword cut that had laid open his right shoulder and breast.

Allan put his brandy-flask to the sufferer's lips, raising his head as he did so, and then addressed him inquiringly. Allan had picked up some Arabic in India, and thus could understand the Bedouin, who informed him that he had been wounded thus, by one of those sons of Anak, our Life-guardsmen, in the charge at Kassassin.

'An Egyptian, by jingo!' exclaimed Carslogie, who came up at that moment. 'Are you about to become a studier of humanity?'

'Well, Cuvier was great in the study of wasps, and so forth. Why shouldn't I study Egyptians?' replied Allan, grimly, 'and this poor devil seems to have been wounded in the affair at Kassassin the other day.'

'You understand him, then?'

'Perfectly. Please bring one of the staff surgeons quickly; he must have been lying here when we took up our ground over-night.'

The Bedouin, whose astonishment that he was not butchered on the instant was great, stared alternately at Allan and at Carslogie, who was a young fellow of the best style, one whose fine face even the hideous tropical helmet (which is such an appalling substitute for the graceful feather bonnet) could not spoil. His figure was slight and elegant, his features clearly cut and refined, and his bright brown chestnut hair was close and curly.

The Bedouin was a perfect type of his race, and, save that he had a good Remington rifle slung over his back, was not much changed in habit, nature, or turn of thought from his ancestors of the tribe of Ishmael.

Though weakened now by suffering and great loss of blood, he seemed spare of figure and light of limb, well-formed and active, tall, but whether thirty or forty years old it was impossible to say. He had a long, thin, and expressive countenance, with glittering black eyes and teeth of pearly whiteness. His colour was a dusky brown, his hair black and wiry.

He was evidently a Bedouin of the desert, as the two ends of the scarlet shawl which formed his turban hung down upon the shoulder, to distinguish him from the Arabs of other tribes. He was clad in a thick dark brown baracan of wool, which served as a dress by day and a bed by night, over which was a robe with wide sleeves.

When the doctor was dressing his wound, which was certainly a terrible sword-cut, his richly embroidered girdle was seen, and this announced him to be a sheikh, and such he was proved to be, as Allan gathered from him that his name was Zeid el Ourdeh, the sheikh of a tribe near Jebel Dimeshk, between the desert and the disused railway to Heliopolis, 'the City of the Sun;' and as he lay there in his picturesque costume, with a group of wondering Highlanders, in their dark kilts and white helmets, gathered round him, and the blood-red sun in the distance, coming swiftly up out of the dry sand of the yellow desert, as it seemed, Allan thought what a subject was the whole for the pencil of an artist.

The Bedouin was on the point of fainting, so great was the agony occasioned by the dressing of his wound; but a mouthful from Allan's flask revived him more than it would have done one usually accustomed to such stimulants.

'Some sick men are going back to the rear at Ismailia,' said Allan. 'Carslogie, please to order the ambulance people to come this way. I'll send this unfortunate creature to the Third Field Hospital.'

Carslogie paused to scrape a vesta and light a cigar, which he proceeded to puff with a sigh of satisfaction.

'Quick, Carslogie,' cried Allan. 'We have no time to lose. The bugles will sound immediately.'

And Carslogie went on his way with the air of a man who thought the world would be none the worse for having a Bedouin the less in it.

In his own language, and in terms peculiarly his own, Allan could make out that the sheikh was thanking him in a low and earnest voice, and adding that while life lasted he 'would always deem him as a brother. You infidels are powerful as the genii of old; you can flash a light at night brilliant as that of the sun at noon; you have another light that springs from the unseen air. I have seen it in the streets of Cairo' (no doubt referring to gas); 'and you can send your thoughts from land to land under the sea more swiftly than even the Afrite did in the days of Solomon; and I fear that from your hands the Egyptians will suffer such chastisement as fell on the people of Noah, of Ad, and of Thamud,' he added, wearily and sadly, as his head fell on one side.

A party of the ambulance had now come, and Allan informed him that he was to be sent to Ismailia. He did more; he placed some money in his hand wherewith to procure necessaries, and, while the eyes of the Bedouin gleamed with gratitude, his brown mahogany and attenuated fingers closed avariciously and tightly on such an unusual gift as coins.

''Pon my soul, Allan Graham,' said Carslogie, 'considering how these rascals treated our wounded at Kassassin, your humanity, to say the least of it, seems to me to be a little misplaced.'

'Perhaps; but I cannot help it. I feel a little tender-hearted just now,' said Allan, with a smile, as the wounded Bedouin--of whom he had not seen the last--was borne away.

The pipes struck up, and once more the columns began a ten-miles' march to Mahsameh. The Gordon Highlanders were in advance, the Camerons next, then came the Highland Light Infantry, and then the Black Watch, all toiling through the soft, deep sand. These splendid regiments were all marching in massed columns, at one pace interval, the cavalry moving with them collaterally on one flank, and the artillery on the other, clattering along, with spunges, buckets, spare wheels, and forge waggons--all forming a grand, impressive spectacle in the midst of the wide Egyptian desert.

To Scottish soldiers, who are usually so well-grounded in their Bible history, the soil they were treading, if the toil made it disgusting on one hand, memory made it full of deep interest on the other. They knew that they were already in, or were approaching, the Land of Goshen, where, by the tasks they had conned at school and those which their ministers superintended, they were aware that they were nigh unto the place where Jacob dwelt of old, that he might be near to Joseph, who lived at Pharaoh's court; near to the place where father and son met, and where we still find Rameses, which was built by the Israelites in the days of their bondage; and, as our soldiers marched on, some there were who recalled these things to each other, as their minds went back to the village kirk, whose bells awoke the echoes of green and lonely glens, and to the firesides of their fathers, when expounding on these things on Saturday night, when the 'big ha' Bible' was produced; and, though they might yawn wearily over such matters at home, these scriptural names and localities had a very different effect upon them now.