The third

act.

Nile, with Abu Klea and the Gubar and Kirbekan, the second Suakim campaign and M'Neill's zariba. Everybody knows these stories, so gallant, so futile. I remember thirteen and fourteen years ago being enormously proud and joyful about Tamai and Abu Klea. I was very young. Read over the tale again now-the faltering and the folly and the failure and you will feel that if Egypt has Baker's Teb and Hicks's ruin to wipe out, England was not so very far from suffering precisely the same humiliations. And in the end we failed, with what loss we still remember, and gave the Sudan away. The second act is not a merry one.

The third was less tragic, but it was perhaps even harder to play. We pass by a mudwalled quadrangle, which was once the artillery barracks; through the gateway you look across sand to the mud ramparts of Halfa. That is the stamp of the days of reorganization, of retrenchment, of difficulties and discouragements, and unconquerable, undisappointed work. Those were the days when the Egyptian army was in the making, when Halfa was the frontier fortress. There are old barracks all over it, where the young fighting force of Egypt used to sleep half awake. The brown flanks of those hills beyond the rifle-range, just a couple of miles or so desertward, have seen Dervishes stealing up in broad day and insolently slashing and stabbing in

the main streets of the bazaar. Yet this time was not all unavenged insult: the long years between 1885 and 1896 saw Egypt defended and its assailants smashed to pieces. Little by little Egypt-British Egypt now-gained strength and new resolution.

The first

Egyptian

Four battles mark the stages from weakness and abandonment to confidence and the resolution to reconquer. At Ginnis, on the last Angloday but one of 1885, came the first Anglo- victory. Egyptian strategical victory. The Mahdists had been tactically beaten before-well beaten; but the result had always been that we fell back and they came on. After Ginnis, fought by the British army of occupation, aided by a small number of the new Egyptian army, we stood firm, and the Dervishes were washed back. There were men of the Cameron Highlanders, on the Atbara, who had fought in that battle: it was not perhaps a very great one, but it was the first time the enemy had been brought to a standstill. He retired behind the Third Cataract.

counter

Then followed three years of raid and Raids and counter-raid. Chermside cut up their ad- raids. vance-guard at Sarras; they captured the fort of Khor Musa, and Machell Bey of the 13th Sudanese drove them out within twelve hours. On the Suakim side the present Sirdar made head against Osman Digna with what irregulars and friendlies he could get together. Then in 1888 Osman waxed insolent and threw

Osman

Digna's repulse.

The

turningpoint of

up trenches against Suakim. It became a regular siege, and Dervish shells fell into the town. But on December 20 Sir Francis Grenfell, the Sirdar, came down and attacked the trenches at the battle of Gemaizeh, and Osman fell back shattered: never again did he come so near his soul's ambition.

Meanwhile Wad-en-Nejumi - the great Emir, the conqueror of Hicks and the captor of Khartum-had hung on the southern frontier, gathering strength for his attack on Egypt. He came in 1889, skirting Halfa in the western desert, striking for a point in Egypt proper above Assuan. His Emirs got out of hand and tried to get to the Nile; in a hard day's tussle at Argin, Colonel Wodehouse and the Halfa garrisons threw him back into the desert again. Nejumi pushed on southward, certain of death, certain of Paradise. At Toski, Grenfell brought him to battle with the flower of the Egyptian army. At the end of the day Nejumi was dead and his army was beginning to die of thirst in the desert. Egypt has never been attacked since.

Finally, in 1891, Colonel Holled-Smith marched against Osman Digna's base outside Suakim, the oasis of Tokat. The Dervishes sprang upon him at Afafit, but the days of surthe drama. prise and panic were over. They were rolled back and shattered to pieces; their base was occupied; and Suakim as well as Halfa had peace. Now all ground was finally main

tained, and all was ripe for attack again. England heard little of this third act; but for all that, unadvertised, hard-working, it was the turning-point of the whole drama.

Cavendish

[In 1882, the Primrose League is founded in England. The Phoenix Park murders are Murder of committed in Dublin. The Panama Canal is and Burke. begun. Arabi Pasha rouses the Egyptians against foreign influence. The English fleet bombards Alexandria, an army is landed, and the Egyptian rebels are dispersed at Tel el Kebir. Arabi is banished to Ceylon and a British army of occupation remains. Italy seizes Assab Bay on the Red Sea, acquires territory north and south and founds the colony of Erytrea.]

ITALIAN COLONIZATION ON THE RED SEA

(A.D. 1882)

PIETRO ORSI

INCE 1870, the Rubattino Navigation Company had established in the Bay of Assab, on the Red Sea, a coaling-station for their steamers, which, ten years later, they ceded to the Italian Government. The latter took possession of this roadstead without any primary intention of annexation or self-aggrandizement, but later let itself be carried tions with away by the tendency-now so widespread Abyssinia. throughout Europe-to colonial development,

Italy enters

and early in 1885, with the idea of pleasing and perhaps of assisting England, then planning the conquest of the Soudan, sent troops to occupy Massowah. Frustrated in their design of aiding the English expedition, by the fall of Khartoum and the Mahdist victory, the Italian contingent now set about establishing friendly relations with John, the Negus of Abyssinia, in the hope of attracting the commerce of the interior to the port of Massowah, but failed nevertheless to propitiate that suspicious prince. One of the Abyssinian chiefs,