Dennis Conolly and a few others could have their way.

It was a March morning upon the eastern fringe of the Nubian desert.
The sun had not yet risen, but a tinge of pink flushed up as far as the
cloudless zenith, and the long strip of sea lay like a rosy ribbon
across the horizon. From the coast inland stretched dreary sand-plains,
dotted over with thick clumps at mimosa scrub and mottled patches of
thorny bush. No tree broke the monotony of that vast desert. The dull,
dusty hue of the thickets, and the yellow glare of the sand, were the
only colours, save at one point, where, from a distance, it seemed that
a land-slip of snow-white stones had shot itself across a low foot-hill.
But as the traveller approached he saw, with a thrill, that these were
no stones, but the bleaching bones of a slaughtered army. With its dull
tints, its gnarled, viprous bushes, its arid, barren soil, and this
death streak trailed across it, it was indeed a nightmare country.

Some eight or ten miles inland the rolling plain curved upwards with a
steeper slope until it ran into a line of red basaltic rock which
zigzagged from north to south, heaping itself up at one point into a
fantastic knoll. On the summit of this there stood upon that March
morning three Arab chieftains--the Sheik Kadra of the Hadendowas, Moussa
Wad Aburhegel, who led the Berber dervishes, and Hamid Wad Hussein, who
had come northward with his fighting men from the land of the Baggaras.
They had all three just risen from their praying-carpets, and were
peering out, with fierce, high-nosed faces thrust forwards, at the
stretch of country revealed by the spreading dawn.

The red rim of the sun was pushing itself now above the distant sea, and
the whole coast-line stood out brilliantly yellow against the rich deep
blue beyond. At one spot lay a huddle of white-walled houses, a mere
splotch in the distance; while four tiny cock-boats, which lay beyond,
marked the position of three of Her Majesty's 10,000-ton troopers and
the admiral's flagship. But it was not upon the distant town, nor upon
the great vessels, nor yet upon the sinister white litter which gleamed
in the plain beneath them, that the Arab chieftains gazed. Two miles
from where they stood, amid the sand-hills and the mimosa scrub, a great
parallelogram had been marked by piled-up bushes. From the inside of
this dozens of tiny blue smoke-reeks curled up into the still morning
air; while there rose from i