Page:H. D. Traill - From Cairo to the Soudan Frontier.djvu/198

 people, the prey of every spoiler and the victims of every sword.

The sakkiyeh is droning and dripping again now after its former wont; the patient beast that turns it has a new master no less patient and even more spiritless than itself; the dead have been buried, the wounded have been returned cured from the military hospital at Wady Haifa, where everything was done for them that surgical skill could do; and the world has resumed its unspeakably slow revolutions in the little Nubian village of Atandan, The stoicism of the Mohammedan superposed upon that blissful apathy of the labourer in all countries which so soon deadens all sense of loss and sorrow for the departed with the numbing anodyne of daily fatigue has already done its work. Except for the occasional pleasure of rehearsing the story of their calamity that revives the villagers' recollection of it, it is probably almost forgotten. The handful of ten-piastre pieces, the yield of a hastily whipped-up subscription, which in