o be done; we had what we managed to bring with
us, and that was all.

There followed days of unremitting toil. We turned our attention to
road-making and with bowed backs and blistered hands shovelled up half the
desert and put it down somewhere else; the other half we put into sandbags
and made gun pits of them. We dug places for the artificers, kitchens for
the cooks, walled-in places for forage, and but for the timely arrival of a
battalion of Indian infantry we should have dug the trenches round the
camp; we were mercifully spared that, however.

By way of a change we dug holes: big holes, little holes, round holes,
square holes, rectangular holes; holes for refuse; wide, deep holes for
washing-pits; every kind of hole you can think of and many you can't.

We never discovered for what purpose most of these holes were dug, but we
dug them; and as a special treat we were allowed to dig an extra big hole,
lined and roofed with sandbags, wherein to hide two hundred thousand rounds
of S.A. ammunition lest the Turks in a moment of aberration should drop a
bomb on it. All this in a temperature of over 100 deg. in the shade at nine
o'clock in the morning!

For summer was leaping towards us with giant strides, and it was one the
like of which Egypt had not known for seventy-five years. Day by day the
sun waxed stronger until work became a torture unspeakable and hardly to be
borne. With the slightest exertion the perspiration ran in rivulets from
face and finger-tips; clothes became saturated and clung like a glove to
our dripping bodies; and if a man stood for a time in one place the sand
around was sodden with his sweat.

Then, too, we had the usual difficulty about drinking water, for there was
none in the camp. The Wells of Moses, twelve in number, were brackish and
only fit for the horses.

Consequently every drop had to be brought from the Quarantine Station,
three miles away, on the shores of the Gulf of Suez; and twice daily did
the water-cart plough a laborious way through the sand. I think it was the
very worst water we ever had, all but undrinkable, in fact. It was so
heavily chlorinated and nauseous that one drank it as medicine. It tasted
the tea, it spoilt the lime-juice, and even the onions failed to disguise
it in the daily stew.

Fortunately there was washing-water in abundance, as we quickly discovered
in our digging operations. Two or three feet down the sand was quite moist,
and if the hole was le