When the railway had been begun across the desert, it was believed that the Nile was always navigable above Abu Hamed.  In former campaigns it had been reconnoitred and the waterway declared clear.  But as the river fell it became evident that this was untrue.  With the subsidence of the waters cataracts began to appear, and to avoid these it became necessary first of all to extend the railway to Bashtinab, later on to Abadia, and finally to the Atbara.  To do this more money had to be obtained, and the usual financial difficulties presented themselves.  Finally, however, the matter was settled, and the extension began at the rate of about a mile a day.  The character of the country varies considerably between Abu Hamed and the Atbara River.  For the first sixty miles the line ran beside the Nile, at the edge of the riparian belt.  On the right was the cultivable though mostly uncultivated strip, long neglected and silted up with fine sand drifted into dunes, from which scattered, scraggy dom palms and prickly mimosa bushes grew.  Between the branches of these sombre trees the river gleamed, a cool and attractive flood.  On the left was the desert, here broken by frequent rocks and dry watercourses.  From Bashtinab to Abadia another desert section of fifty miles was necessary to avoid some very difficult ground by the Nile bank.  From Abadia to the Atbara the last stretch of the line runs across a broad alluvial expanse from whose surface plane-trees of mean appearance, but affording welcome shade, rise, watered by the autumn rains.  The fact that the railway was approaching regions where rain is not an almost unknown phenomenon increased the labour of construction.  To prevent the embankments from being washed away in the watercourses, ten bridges and sixty culverts had to be made; and this involved the transport over the railway of more than 1,000 tons of material in addition to the ordinary plant.

By the arrival of the reinforcements at Berber the fighting force at the front was doubled:  doubled also was the business of supply.  The task of providing the food of an army in a desert, a thousand miles from their base, and with no apparent means of subsistence at the end of the day’s march, is less picturesque, though not less important, than the building of railways along which that nourishment is drawn to the front.  Supply and transport stand or fall together; history depends on both; and in order to explain the commissariat aspect of the River War, I must again both repeat and anticipate the account.  The Sirdar exercised a direct and personal supervision over the whole department of supply, but his action was restricted almost entirely to the distribution of the rations.  Their accumulation and regular supply were the task of Colonel Rogers, and this officer, by three years of exact calculation and unfailing allowance for the unforeseen, has well deserved his high reputation as a feeder of armies.