Curiosity found no comfort but in patience or speculation.  The camp for the most part received the news with a shrug.  After their easy victory the soldiers walked delicately.  They knew that they belonged to the most powerful force that had ever penetrated the heart of Africa.  If there was to be more war, the Government had but to give the word, and the Grand Army of the Nile would do by these newcomers as they had done by the Dervishes.

On the 8th the Sirdar started up the White Nile for Fashoda with five steamers, the XIth and XIIIth Battalions of Soudanese, two companies of the Cameron Highlanders, Peake’s battery of artillery, and four Maxim guns.  Three days later he arrived at Reng, and there found, as the crew of the Tewfikia had declared, some 500 Dervishes encamped on the bank, and the Safia steamer moored to it.  These stupid fellows had the temerity to open fire on the vessels.  Whereat the Sultan, steaming towards their dem, replied with a fierce shell fire which soon put them to flight.  The Safia, being under steam, made some attempt to escape—­whither, it is impossible to say—­and Commander Keppel by a well-directed shell in her boilers blew her up, much to the disgust of the Sirdar, who wanted to add her to his flotilla.

After this incident the expedition continued its progress up the White Nile.  The sudd which was met with two days’ journey south of Khartoum did not in this part of the Nile offer any obstacle to navigation, as the strong current of the river clears the waterway; but on either side of the channel a belt of the tangled weed, varying from twelve to twelve hundred yards in breadth, very often prevented the steamers from approaching the bank to tie up.  The banks themselves depressed the explorers by their melancholy inhospitality.  At times the river flowed past miles of long grey grass and swamp-land, inhabited and habitable only by hippopotami.  At times a vast expanse of dreary mud flats stretched as far as the eye could see.  At others the forest, dense with an impenetrable undergrowth of thorn-bushes, approached the water, and the active forms of monkeys and even of leopards darted among the trees.  But the country —­whether forest, mud-flat, or prairie—­was always damp and feverish:  a wet land steaming under a burning sun and humming with mosquitoes and all kinds of insect life.

Onward and southward toiled the flotilla, splashing the brown water into foam and startling the strange creatures on the banks, until on the 18th of September they approached Fashoda.  The gunboats waited, moored to the bank for some hours of the afternoon, to allow a message which had been sent by the Sirdar to the mysterious Europeans, to precede his arrival, and early in the morning of the 19th a small steel rowing-boat was observed coming down stream to meet the expedition.  It contained a Senegalese sergeant and two men, with a letter from Major Marchand announcing the arrival of the French troops and their formal occupation of the Soudan.  It, moreover, congratulated the Sirdar on his victory, and welcomed him to Fashoda in the name of France.