Page:Harris Dickson--Old Reliable in Africa.djvu/137

 heat, scintillated on the chocolate Nile, and flashed into sharp silhouette a solitary tugboat.

This tugboat—bull-doggish, irreverent, British—hurled its defiant smoke into the sky; for was it not transporting Colonel Spottiswoode and Zack Foster, Effendi, to the Beni Yeb Plantation, where Fergus Cameron extorted fifteen thousand cantars of cotton annually from the dry Sudan? Cameron had already conquered a foot-hold in the desert; with the aid of these Americans they would subdue unto the plow that vast Ghezireh, south of Khartum. The tugboat continued puffing. To their front, to the east and west, stretched those barren immensities of the Sudan—brownish, brickish and dingy red through all the shriveling ages. Behind them lay Upper Egypt, strangled in the sand.

Colonel Spottiswoode slept on deck, else he could not have slept at all. At the first dazzle of light he got up. There was no rolling over for a second nap after that scorching sun made ready for business. He stepped into a pair of heelless slippers and stood at the rail in his pajamas.

Lyttleton Bey—veteran of many a Dervish fight—warned him from the next pallet: "I say, Colonel Spottiswoode, you'd better put on your helmet; that sun might bowl you over."

"Why, the sun is not half up."