No More Learning

"Sugar-bags, indeed! Hi! you pilot man there! lend me all the sails for
that whale-boat. "

A fez-crowned head bobbed up in the stern-sheets, divided itself into
exact halves with one flashing grin, and bobbed down again. The man of
the tattered breeches, clad only in a Norfolk jacket and a gray flannel
shirt, went on with his clumsy sewing, while Dick chuckled over the
sketch.

Some twenty whale-boats were nuzzling a sand-bank which was dotted
with English soldiery of half a dozen corps, bathing or washing their
clothes. A heap of boat-rollers, commissariat-boxes, sugar-bags,
and flour--and small-arm-ammunition-cases showed where one of the
whale-boats had been compelled to unload hastily; and a regimental
carpenter was swearing aloud as he tried, on a wholly insufficient
allowance of white lead, to plaster up the sun-parched gaping seams of
the boat herself.

"First the bloomin' rudder snaps," said he to the world in general;
"then the mast goes; an' then, s' help me, when she can't do nothin'
else, she opens 'erself out like a cock-eyed Chinese lotus. "

"Exactly the case with my breeches, whoever you are," said the tailor,
without looking up. "Dick, I wonder when I shall see a decent shop
again. "

There was no answer, save the incessant angry murmur of the Nile as it
raced round a basalt-walled bend and foamed across a rock-ridge half
a mile upstream. It was as though the brown weight of the river would
drive the white men back to their own country. The indescribable scent
of Nile mud in the air told that the stream was falling and the next
few miles would be no light thing for the whale-boats to overpass. The
desert ran down almost to the banks, where, among gray, red, and black
hillocks, a camel-corps was encamped.
No man dared even for a day lose
touch of the slow-moving boats; there had been no fighting for weeks
past, and throughout all that time the Nile had never spared them. Rapid
had followed rapid, rock rock, and island-group island-group, till the
rank and file had long since lost all count of direction and very
nearly of time. They were moving somewhere, they did not know why, to do
something, they did not know what. Before them lay the Nile, and at the
other end of it was one Gordon, fighting for the dear life, in a town
called Khartoum. There were columns of British troops in the desert,
or in one of the many deserts; there were yet more columns waiting to
embark on the river; there were fresh drafts waiting at Assioot and
Assuan; there were lies and rumours running over the face of the
hopeless land from Suakin to the Sixth Cataract, and men supposed
generally that there must be some one in authority to direct the general
scheme of the many movements. The duty of that particular river-column
was to keep the whale-boats afloat in the water, to avoid trampling
on the villagers' crops when the gangs "tracked" the boats with lines
thrown from midstream, to get as much sleep and food as was possible,
and, above all, to press on without delay in the teeth of the churning
Nile.

With the soldiers sweated and toiled the correspondents of the
newspapers, and they were almost as ignorant as their companions. But
it was above all things necessary that England at breakfast should be
amused and thrilled and interested, whether Gordon lived or died, or
half the British army went to pieces in the sands. The Soudan campaign
was a picturesque one, and lent itself to vivid word-painting. Now and
again a "Special" managed to get slain,--which was not altogether
a disadvantage to the paper that employed him,--and more often the
hand-to-hand nature of the fighting allowed of miraculous escapes which
were worth telegraphing home at eighteenpence the word. There were many
correspondents with many corps and columns,--from the veterans who had
followed on the heels of the cavalry that occupied Cairo in '82, what
time Arabi Pasha called himself king, who had seen the first miserable
work round Suakin when the sentries were cut up nightly and the scrub
swarmed with spears, to youngsters jerked into the business at the
end of a telegraph-wire to take the places of their betters killed or
invalided.

Among the seniors--those who knew every shift and change in the
perplexing postal arrangements, the value of the seediest, weediest
Egyptian garron offered for sale in Cairo or Alexandria, who could talk
a telegraph-clerk into amiability and soothe the ruffled vanity of
a newly appointed staff-officer when press regulations became
burdensome--was the man in the flannel shirt, the black-browed
Torpenhow. He represented the Central Southern Syndicate in the
campaign, as he had represented it in the Egyptian war, and elsewhere.
The syndicate did not concern itself greatly with criticisms of
attack and the like. It supplied the masses, and all it demanded was
picturesqueness and abundance of detail; for there is more joy in
England over a soldier who insubordinately steps out of square to rescue
a comrade than over twenty generals slaving even to baldness at the
gross details of transport and commissariat.

He had met at Suakin a young man, sitting on the edge of a recently
abandoned redoubt about the size of a hat-box, sketching a clump of
shell-torn bodies on the gravel plain.