Page:H. D. Traill - From Cairo to the Soudan Frontier.djvu/44

26 on her decks as we glide past this looming bastion, and exchange its utter blackness for the grey surface of the canal bank. For all that appears she might be the phantom ship that the Ancient Mariner saw, the ship of "the nightmare Death-in-Life, that thicks men's blood with cold." As a matter of fact, she is a French transport returning with troops from Madagascar.

If she looked spectral in the weird half-light around us, it is only because every other object which we are passing has a phantasmal air. The patch of illuminated water before our bows is as bright as day; but the buoys which lie outside this luminous arc slip past us like a grey procession of ghosts, the banks are as shadowy as the shores of Styx itself, and the desert stretches away on either side vast and silent, like the "empty kingdoms of Dis." It would scarcely surprise one to see Charon pulling across our wake with a boatload of strengthless shades. The ferryman and his freight would hardly