From Abu Simbel to Wady Halfa the river, escaped from the domination of the Pharaohs, begins to talk about dead white men.  Thirty years ago, young English officers in India lied and intrigued furiously that they might be attached to expeditions whose bases were sometimes at Suakim, sometimes quite in the desert air, but all of whose deeds are now quite forgotten.  Occasionally the dragoman, waving a smooth hand east or south-easterly, will speak of some fight.  Then every one murmurs:  ’Oh yes.  That was Gordon, of course,’ or ’Was that before or after Omdurman?’ But the river is much more precise.  As the boat quarters the falling stream like a puzzled hound, all the old names spurt up again under the paddle-wheels—­’Hicks’ army—­Val Baker—­El Teb—­Tokar—­Tamai—­Tamanieb and Osman Digna!’ Her head swings round for another slant:  ’We cannot land English or Indian troops:  if consulted, recommend abandonment of the Soudan within certain limits.’ That was my Lord Granville chirruping to the advisers of His Highness the Khedive, and the sentence comes back as crisp as when it first shocked one in ’84.  Next—­here is a long reach between flooded palm trees—­next, of course, comes Gordon—­and a delightfully mad Irish war correspondent who was locked up with him in Khartoum.  Gordon—­Eighty-four—­Eighty-five—­the Suakim-Berber Railway really begun and quite as really abandoned.  Korti—­Abu Klea—­the Desert Column—­a steamer called the Safieh not the Condor, which rescued two other steamers wrecked on their way back from a Khartoum in the red hands of the Mahdi of those days.  Then—­the smooth glide over deep water continues—­another Suakim expedition with a great deal of Osman Digna and renewed attempts to build the Suakim-Berber Railway.  ‘Hashin,’ say the paddle-wheels, slowing all of a sudden—­’MacNeill’s Zareba—­the 15th Sikhs and another native regiment—­Osman Digna in great pride and power, and Wady Halfa a frontier town.  Tamai, once more; another siege of Suakim:  Gemaiza; Handub; Trinkitat, and Tokar—­1887.’

The river recalls the names; the mind at once brings up the face and every trick of speech of some youth met for a few hours, maybe, in a train on the way to Egypt of the old days.  Both name and face had utterly vanished from one’s memory till then.

It was another generation that picked up the ball ten years later and touched down in Khartoum.  Several people aboard the Cook boat had been to that city.  They all agreed that the hotel charges were very high, but that you could buy the most delightful curiosities in the native bazaar.  But I do not like bazaars of the Egyptian kind, since a discovery I made at Assouan.  There was an old man—­a Mussulman—­who pressed me to buy some truck or other, but not with the villainous camaraderie that generations of low-caste tourists have taught the people, nor yet with the cosmopolitan light-handedness of appeal which the town-bred Egyptian picks up much