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Updated: June 12, 2025
No armies of any considerable size have ever attempted to traverse the almost waterless desert which separates the Lower Euphrates valley from the delta of the Nile.
We had water-bags made out of the skins of kangaroos and wallabies, and would camp wherever possible close to a native well, where we knew food was to be found in plenty. At this period I noticed that the more easterly I went, the more ranges I encountered; whilst the somewhat dreary and mostly waterless lowland lay to the west.
There was no way of retreat open to the Dervishes, except to cross the waterless desert; or to fly south, keeping to the course of the Atbara, which would take them farther and farther from the Nile with every mile they marched. Bringing up all his force, therefore, from Kennur and the Atbara fort, which one battalion was left to guard, the Sirdar took up his post at Hudi.
They had proved sterling soldiers in the desert war, hard, full of courage, capable of making light of the longest trek in waterless stretches of country, and mobile to a degree the Turks never dreamed of.
The scene changed. A desert stretched out before him. Limitless, with the blazing colours of the arid sand topped by a cloudless sky, it revealed but one suggestion of life in its herbless, waterless, shadowless solitude.
When it was found that the Khalifa had escaped by the south end of Omdurman, Colonel Broadwood, with his two regiments of Egyptian cavalry and the Camel Corps, started in pursuit. Gunboats also proceeded up the White Nile to head off the fugitives. Unfortunately as there had been a very general rainfall, the desert routes towards Kordofan were not absolutely waterless.
It would be convenient to pause here and take stock of the military situation in Egypt, in the light of over a year's experience of actual war. In the first place, the Turks had disillusioned us as to the impossibility of crossing the waterless desert, and had actually crossed it with a considerable armed and organized force.
Their advance, which had hitherto led them through a waterless desert, was now checked by a raging torrent. The river was in full flood, and a channel of deep water, broader than the Thames below London Bridge and racing along at seven miles an hour, formed a serious obstacle.
Out of breath I stood up in the dusty waterless tank, and got out my binoculars. Towards where the crackle of machine-guns had been heard, I saw a bush-clad bank. Tucked up against it were horses and guns. Big Boche shells kept falling near, and the landscape was wreathed in smoke.
Beneath, the Chusco wound its half dry course and off to the east a blue haze, melting into the unending sand, told of a treeless and waterless waste. "And there," exclaimed Alan at last, pointing off to the northwest where snow-capped, ragged peaks rose out of a black jumble of mountains, "are the Tunit Chas and the land of our dreams. To-morrow " "One moment," interrupted Bob quickly.
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