have meant comparatively little; on the Nile, only those who have seen it will comprehend the gigantic nature of the task. One advantage of the long and narrow line – the only means of communicating with the front is, that it has multiplied our force a hundred-fold, numerically, in the natives' estimation. As the boats came trooping up during the latter months of the year, supplemented by sundry camel-corps by land, the influx of men must have seemed to them interminable; while the daily sight of 100 odd whalers and numerous native craft, now employed on convoy of stores and ammunition between Akasha and Hannek, must greatly increase their ideas of our resources. Since the troops ceased passing up, the scenes have altered greatly. Ambigol and Dal were about the longest portage, the distance from point of landing to that of re-embarking varying as the river fell, and new cataracts and rapids were developed. The distance which had to be traversed was in each of these cases about 3½ miles; and looking down from any of the hills which surround the fortunately flat portage across the desert at Dal, the spectacle was very striking. Small gangs of men, – sometimes native, sometimes English – each lot representing the contents (some sixty packages) of a whaler, – might be seen, nearly all day long, while boats were arriving, following each other at intervals of half an hour. Each man carried a box or sack, and about four halts were made en route. During these, it must be confessed, robberies were frequent: the bearer, scorched by the sun and blinded with the dust, would throw his burden angrily down; the case would break, and to his admiring gaze would be unfolded the hidden treasures of jam, pickles, cocoa, &c., for which a pretty general scramble at once took place. Effectual supervision was next to impossible, as the commandant, with his limited and overworked staff, was engaged from long before sunrise, and often far into the night, in the work of organisation at either end of the cataract. Looking down at them from a height, these fatigue-parties resembled batches of gigantic ants; while occasionally the great white form of an upturned whale-boat moved mysteriously along the plain, and, surrounded by the shuffling crowd of sixty, who, with only one halt, took it across to the head of the cataract, resembled some huge shell or hive borne aloft by its inhabitants. Of these some twenty-four, during a week of dead calm, had to be portaged across at Dal; after that, by the selection of picked crews from the soldiers of each company passing through, and with the aid of some sixty Canadians under Lieut.-Col. Alleyne and Lord Avonmore, the boats, after unloading, were sailed and pulled up the rapids at the rate of twenty to thirty a-day. It was, indeed, chiefly due to the skill and exertions of the former officer that a serious block, at one time anticipated through the rapid subsidence of the river at Dal, did not take place; while the untiring energy and great resource of the late Lord Avonmore, and the hearty co-operation of Colonel Burnaby, who was at that time District Inspector, were of the utmost assistance to Colonel Trotter, the then commandant, in maintaining unchecked the constant flow of troops and stores through that important station.
At the time, however, of which we speak, the action of command-
