The labours of the Railway Battalion and its officers did not end with the completion of the line to Abu Hamed.  The Desert Railway was made.  It had now to be maintained, worked, and rapidly extended.  The terminus at Halfa had become a busy town.  A mud village was transformed into a miniature Crewe.  The great workshops that had grown with the line were equipped with diverse and elaborate machines.  Plant of all kinds purchased in Cairo or requisitioned from England, with odds and ends collected from Ishmail’s scrap heaps, filled the depots with an extraordinary variety of stores.  Foundries, lathes, dynamos, steam-hammers, hydraulic presses, cupola furnaces, screw-cutting machines, and drills had been set up and were in continual work.  They needed constant attention.  Every appliance for repairing each must be provided.  To haul the tonnage necessary to supply the army and extend the line nearly forty engines were eventually required.  Purchased at different times and from different countries, they included ten distinct patterns; each pattern needed a special reserve of spare parts.  The permutations and combinations of the stores were multiplied.  Some of the engines were old and already worn out.  These broke down periodically.  The frictional parts of all were affected by the desert sand, and needed ceaseless attention and repair.  The workshops were busy night and day for seven days a week.

To the complication of machinery was added the confusion of tongues.  Natives of various races were employed as operatives.  Foremen had been obtained from Europe.  No fewer than seven separate languages were spoken in the shops.  Wady Halfa became a second Babel.  Yet the undertaking prospered.  The Engineer officers displayed qualities of tact and temper:  their director was cool and indefatigable.  Over all the Sirdar exercised a regular control.  Usually ungracious, rarely impatient, never unreasonable, he moved among the workshops and about the line, satisfying himself that all was proceeding with economy and despatch.  The sympathy of common labour won him the affection of the subalterns.  Nowhere in the Soudan was he better known than on the railroad.  Nowhere was he so ardently believed in.

It is now necessary to anticipate the course of events.  As soon as the railway reached Abu Hamed, General Hunter’s force, which was holding that place, dropped its slender camel communications with Merawi and drew its supplies along the new line direct from Wady Halfa.  After the completion of the desert line there was still left seventeen miles of material for construction, and the railway was consequently at once extended to Dakhesh, sixteen miles south of Abu Hamed.  Meanwhile Berber was seized, and military considerations compelled the concentration of a larger force to maintain that town.  The four battalions which had remained at Merawi were floated down stream to Kerma, and, there entraining, were carried by Halfa and Abu Hamed to Dakhesh—­a journey of 450 miles.