You'll see Durrance will turn up right enough, though he won't hurry about it." "He is three weeks overdue," objected the colonel, "and he's methodical after a fashion.

I am afraid." Major Walters pointed out his arm to the white empty desert across the river.
"If he had travelled that way, westward, I might agree," he said.

"But Durrance went east through the mountain country toward Berenice and the Red Sea.

The tribes he went to visit were quiet, even in the worst times, when Osman Digna lay before Suakin." The colonel, however, took no comfort from Walters's confidence.

He tugged at his moustache and repeated, "He is three weeks overdue." Lieutenant Calder knocked the ashes from his pipe and refilled it.