Page:H. D. Traill - From Cairo to the Soudan Frontier.djvu/201

 vegetation it might be a sequestered villa on the Upper Thames. A little flight of half a dozen steps leading up to and through its shrubberies from the waters edge to the entrance contributes to the support of the illusion. Some few hundred yards down the river you have passed another long, low building, set parallel instead of transversely to the river, which you judge, and rightly so, to be the officers' mess-room. Otherwise, there is nothing to show that you have reached a frontier "stronghold" of Egypt.

The place effectually hides its military character from this point of approach. It turns its warlike face away from the river and towards the desert, and looks out only with the air of a smiling village over the broad and tranquil Nile. Yet this is Wady Haifa, the finger-tip, so to speak, of the arm of British protective power in Egypt, and as true a breakwater of barbarism as any that is to be found on the face of the globe. For here, to every pacific and law-abiding