Page:Viscount Hardinge and the Advance of the British Dominions into the Punjab.djvu/61

Rh in India, in order that they might conjointly carry out such a project.

On the 1st of July we were steaming down the Red Sea, and on the 5th disembarked at Aden, which was carefully inspected by Sir Henry. Mounting his horse before daybreak, he rode over the whole cantonment, after having first inspected H.M.'s 17th Foot and the 47th Regiment of Madras Native Infantry. He remarks in a letter to his wife that this chaotic mass of volcanic rock, with hardly a blade of grass visible, exceeded anything he had ever seen in Europe or America. The Arabs of the neighbourhood were small, active men; but when he went down the ranks of his own sturdy Englishmen, their marked superiority over the Sepoys of the garrison was a matter of no small satisfaction to him. During his short stay at Aden he made notes on all the weak points of defence then to be detected, and on his return to the steamer employed himself in drawing up an official report pointing out the errors of the Bombay Engineers, and proving how unnecessary was the extravagant expenditure then going on upon the rock.

This Aden report, the substance of which was made public, is considered to be among the ablest of Lord Hardinge's military minutes. Though not himself a military engineer, he had acquired at the Staff College all the information requisite for seizing at once upon the strong and weak points of such a question. He ridiculed the idea of making Aden a