Page:H. D. Traill - From Cairo to the Soudan Frontier.djvu/12

vi that ancient and unchanging people, for whose destinies England, the last of many great Empires to undertake that duty, has by so strange a series of chances become responsible. At the time when my latest chapters were penned some weeks had yet to pass before the orders were given for the forward movement into the Soudan. But advance was already "in the air." Workmen were busy repairing the iron-plates of the armoured transports at Shel-lâl; signs of unwonted military activity, indefinable but unmistakable, were to be discerned at Wady Haifa; the restlessness of the Dervishes, especially as evidenced by their recent audacious and successful raid on a Nubian river village, well within the line of the English defences, was in all Egyptian mouths. Enough was to be seen to fill the mind of the least expert of civilians with suspicions which it needed only