Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: June 27, 2025
The resolution to exclude the latter was further strengthened by the fact that the labour of building a railway over the hills behind Suakin would have been very great. The route via Abu Hamed was selected by the exclusion of the alternatives. But it had distinct and apparent advantages. Abu Hamed was within striking distance of the army at Merawi.
They then sent word back to Abu Hamed of what they had done, and sat down in the town, thus audaciously captured, to await developments. The astonishing news of the fall of Berber reached General Hunter on the 2nd of September. He immediately telegraphed to Merawi. Sir Herbert Kitchener was confronted with a momentous question: should Berber be occupied or not?
The army had now passed beyond the scope of a camel, or other pack-animal, system of supply, except for very short distances, and it was obvious that they could only advance in future along either the railway or a navigable reach of the river, and preferably along both. From the Dal Cataract near Kosheh there is a clear waterway at high Nile to Merawi.
The Egyptian cavalry at Merawi received their orders on the 25th of December, and the British officers hurried from their Christmas dinners to prepare for their long march across the bend of the Nile to Berber.
The position of a strong force at Merawi only 120 miles along the river bank from Abu Hamed, the northern Dervish post was, as will be seen, convenient to the continuance of the campaign whenever the time should arrive. But a long delay in the advance was now inevitable, and nearly a year was destined to pass without any collision between the forces of the Khedive and those of the Khalifa.
The re-occupation of the province of Dongola in 1896, freed the Nile up to Merawi, and gave the disaffected Kababish, Jaalin and riverain tribesmen a chance of reverting to their allegiance to the Khedive. It also enabled the Sirdar to pass his gunboats farther up the river. Another gain issuing from the forward movement was that his right was secured from serious attack.
The second letter a mad and fatal letter carried defiance to the Khalifa. Rundle, who was at Merawi when the Jaalin messenger found him, lost no time. A large amount of ammunition and 1,100 Remington rifles were speedily collected and hurried on camels across the desert by the Korti-Metemma route, escorted by a strong detachment of the Camel Corps.
"Colonel Stewart did not like the look of him when he came to offer his services, but Hassan Bey, who was with the Englishman, thought that Sulieman was to be trusted, and so a conference was held, and Sulieman undertook to find camels to take all the shipwrecked travellers on to Merawi if he could.
But from Merawi to Abu Hamed the river is broken by continual cataracts, and the broken ground of both banks made a railway nearly an impossibility. The movements of the French expeditions towards the Upper Nile counselled speed. The poverty of Egypt compelled economy. The Nile route, though sure, would be slow and very expensive. A short cut must be found.
The information Gregory had gathered had shown that Mahmud had no intention of advancing against Merawi; and that no reinforcements had, as yet, started to join the force at Abu Hamed; the Dervish leader being convinced that the Nile was not yet high enough to admit of boats going up the cataract.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking