lay in a little heap upon a blackened stone.

"And lately," said Durrance.

Mather walked on, mounted a few rough steps to the crumbled archway of
the entrance, and passed into the unroofed corridors and rooms. Durrance
turned the ashes over with his boot. The stump of a charred and whitened
twig glowed red. Durrance set his foot upon it, and a tiny thread of
smoke spurted into the air.

"Very lately," he said to himself, and he followed Mather into the
fort. In the corners of the mud walls, in any fissure, in the very
floor, young trees were sprouting. Rearward a steep glacis and a deep
fosse defended the works. Durrance sat himself down upon the parapet of
the wall above the glacis, while the pigeons wheeled and circled
overhead, thinking of the long months during which Tewfik must daily
have strained his eyes from this very spot toward the pass over the
hills from Suakin, looking as that other general far to the south had
done, for the sunlight flashing on the weapons of the help which did not
come. Mather sat by his side and reflected in quite another spirit.

"Already the Guards are steaming out through the coral reefs toward
Suez. A week and our turn comes," he said. "What a God-forsaken
country!"

"I come back to it," said Durrance.

"Why?"

"I like it. I like the people."

Mather thought the taste unaccountable, but he knew nevertheless that,
however unaccountable in itself, it accounted for his companion's rapid
promotion and success. Sympathy had stood Durrance in the stead of much
ability. Sympathy had given him patience and the power to understand, so
that during these three years of campaign he had left far quicker and
far abler men behind him, in his knowledge of the sorely harassed tribes
of the eastern Soudan. He liked them; he could enter into their hatred
of the old Turkish rule, he could understand their fanaticism, and their
pretence of fanaticism under the compulsion of Osman Digna's hordes.

"Yes, I shall come back," he said, "and in three months' time. For one
thing, we know--every Englishman in Egypt, too, knows--that this can't
be the end. I want to be here when the work's taken in hand again. I
hate unfinished things."

The sun beat relentlessly upon the plateau; the men, stretched in the
shade, slept; the afternoon was as noiseless as the morning; Durrance
and Mather sat for some while compelled to silence by the silence
surrounding them. But Durrance's eyes turned at last from th