‘And what school is that?’ I asked in English of a small, eager youth.

‘Madrissah,’ said he most intelligently, which being translated means just ‘school.’

‘Yes, but what school?’

‘Yes, Madrissah, school, sir,’ and he tagged after to see what else the imbecile wanted.

A line of railway track, that must have fed big workshops in its time, led me between big-roomed houses and offices labelled departmentally, with here and there a clerk at work.  I was directed and re-directed by polite Egyptian officials (I wished to get at a white officer if possible, but there wasn’t one about); was turned out of a garden which belonged to an Authority; hung round the gate of a bungalow with an old-established compound and two white men sitting in chairs on a verandah; wandered down towards the river under the palm trees, where the last red light came through; lost myself among rusty boilers and balks of timber; and at last loafed back in the twilight escorted by the small boy and an entire brigade of ghosts, not one of whom I had ever met before, but all of whom I knew most intimately.  They said it was the evenings that used to depress them most, too; so they all came back after dinner and bore me company, while I went to meet a friend arriving by the night train from Khartoum.

She was an hour late, and we spent it, the ghosts and I, in a brick-walled, tin-roofed shed, warm with the day’s heat; a crowd of natives laughing and talking somewhere behind in the darkness.  We knew each other so well by that time, that we had finished discussing every conceivable topic of conversation—­the whereabouts of the Mahdi’s head, for instance—­work, reward, despair, acknowledgment, flat failure, all the real motives that had driven us to do anything, and all our other longings.  So we sat still and let the stars move, as men must do when they meet this kind of train.

Presently I asked:  ’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.