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.