Chapter VI: A Skirmish in the Desert

Buried in the sand!

Yes--it was all true--too true; the gay, handsome, and usually light-hearted Laird of Stratherroch, one of the most popular fellows in the Black Watch--he who had won the V.C. in battle with his good claymore--he whom Eveline had known in the heyday of his life, when the world seemed so fresh and fair to both, whom she had last seen as a despairing and broken-hearted lover, was gone--struck down by a bullet of some nameless Egyptian savage, buried in the desert, and she would never see him more, though the poignancy of his farewell would haunt her for many a day.

And thus it all came to pass.

A band of Bedouins had been hovering in the vicinity of Matarieh, plundering and looting. These Allan, after a consultation with Cameron, resolved to make a demonstration against, and with Farquharson, his sergeant, and thirty picked men, in light marching order, they quitted the village, and about an hour before sunrise took their way towards the desert.

The light of the coming day shone along the latter, a sandy waste, overlooked by Jebel Mokattam, a chain of rocks abrupt and barren that extends from Cairo to the cataracts. They are generally flat, with beetling summits, while below, on the face which fronts the Nile, they are furrowed as if water-worn by the rain of ages.

On the other flank, towards Jebel Dimeshk, rises a ridge of sand-hills that follows in the same direction at an equal distance, all the windings and sinuosities of that which lines the eastern bank.

Between lay the winding line of the disused railway. In front the horizon seemed foggy or dusty, and along the desert the sun shone for a time, as he rose, like a red ball, shorn of his rays.

In rear the party left behind the village of Matarieh, with the clumps of palm-trees, beyond which, with the tall obelisk and the ruins of several sphinxes, rose the great mounds of earth that mark the site of Heliopolis, 'the City of the Sun,' the inhabitants of which worshipped a bull called Mnevis, with the same ceremonies as the Apis of Memphis, and where Apollo had an oracle.

Over the same ground where in 1800 a battle was fought between the French and Turks, in which the latter were defeated with the loss of eight thousand men and all their cannon and baggage, Allan's little band marched merrily on towards the desert in hope to 'polish off' a few of the Bedouins before returning to quarters.

They were well supplied with ammunition; each man had a day's rations in his haversack, and his water-bottle filled with the red sandy fluid of the Nile. In Exodus we are told that the Egyptians loathed to drink the waters of that river, and, as Cameron said, 'the men of the Black Watch were much of the same mind.'

Now, in making a reconnaissance, Allan Graham was a trained soldier enough to know that cover from view is important, as it enables troops, whatever their strength, to form for action; thus he hoped to utilise the railway bank, or, if not that, some of the sandy undulations around it.

As the first object in reconnoitring is to get observation, with his sergeant, who was a sharp fellow, he went at some distance in front of his men, field-glass in hand, and looked sharply about him.

He continued to move in a north-easterly direction for nearly ten miles till mid-day, but saw nothing of Bedouins, and then, halting amid a clump of palms, threw out some sentinels towards the front, piled arms, and the Highlanders in their kilts and red serges threw themselves on the grass and prepared to make a meal of what they had brought with them, washed down by Nile water.

There he remained till noon was long past, and he began to think of falling back on Matarieh.

Even under the shadow of the palms they were tormented by gnats and sandflies.

'We are in the land of the "Arabian Nights"--the land of giants, fairies, and genii, and all that sort of thing,' said Cameron, as he lit a cigar; 'but, if a little picturesque, Allan, the discomforts are abominably real.'

'Surely water is lying yonder, sir,' said Sergeant Farquharson, 'and we might get our water-bottles filled.'

All looked eagerly in the direction indicated, towards the base of the Jebel Dimeshk range. The sun was clear, bright, and powerful now. Amid the silent waste of sand a long, narrow lake seemed at no great distance.

'If water it is,' exclaimed Cameron, 'there are certainly men moving through it.'

'The Bedouins, by Jove!' cried Allan. 'Down, down,' he shouted to his sentinels, 'lie down, under cover if you can.'

They lay down flat, and Allan, adopting the same position, turned his field-glass towards the mirage, for such it was--that beautiful optical illusion produced by the sun's rays reflected from the heated sand, and which raises before the eye of the thirsty wayfarer the tantalising but perfect representation of distant lakes or pleasing sheets of water.

About eighty Bedouin horse were moving slowly from the direction of the Jebel Dimeskh range towards the line of the railway. Whatever their object was, from a description given to Allan, he was certain they were those of whom he was in search, and that their object was to turn up in the vicinity of Matarieh after sunset, intent on plunder, as everywhere these lawless sons of the desert were taking advantage of the confusion of affairs in Egypt.

Some were armed with long muskets of antique form, but by far the greater number had Remington rifles--flung away by Arabi's fugitive soldiers--slung over their backs, or at their saddles, weapons that had superseded the javelin, the bow, and in many instances the spear. They were clad in barracans of dark brown wool, with floating burnouses, many of them spotlessly white; and as they seemed to be making slowly, for shelter doubtless, towards the clump of palms occupied by Allan's party, which was yet beyond their range of vision, he drew the whole off and took post behind the bank of the abandoned railway, a movement which was fortunately quite unseen by the foe.

Formation against cavalry would be useless, as these wild horsemen have no idea of tactics; and, to deceive them as to his force, Allan formed his men in extended order, three paces apart, each man lying on his face, close under the line of the embankment.

Allan knew from experience how fire from a steep slope becomes plunging; thus he congratulated himself that the slope for his musketry was one that was parallel to the trajectory of the rifles.

By a single word he could, if necessary, form his men in a rallying square on the crest of the line. As the Bedouins came riding forward, in a disorderly group, at an easy, ambling pace, Allan, by means of his field-glass, was certain that in their leader he recognised the Arab, Zeid-el-Ourdeh, whom he had succoured after his wounds at Kassassin, and sent to the hospital at Ismailia.

He was wearing the same robes with wide sleeves, and the richly embroidered girdle he wore when found near the camp.

'Steady and still, men,' cried Allan, 'and we'll play old gooseberry with these beggars, as we have done everywhere else.'

They were about five hundred paces distant, a range for which the rifles were sighted, when suddenly a Bedouin uttered a shrill cry of alarm, and all began to unsling their firearms. His eye had detected a clay-coloured helmet with its red hackle on the left side.

Ere they could fire a shot, the Highlanders from their cover poured in a deadly fire, and more than twenty men and horses went down in confused heaps; the latter, in the agony of their wounds and terror, kicking and lashing wildly out with their hoofs, raising clouds of sand, while braining the skulls and breaking the limbs of the fallen riders, whether dead or wounded; then shrieks and groans, cries and curses loaded the air, as all who were untouched or able to keep their saddles, after firing, half at random, a ragged volley, wheeled round their light chargers and went off with the speed of the wind.

'Cease firing!' cried Allan Graham; 'we have taught these fellows a lesson severe enough for the day, and I don't think they will venture near Matarieh again.'

In that, however, he was mistaken, as he afterwards found to his cost.

'And now,' he added, as he crossed the line of railway, sword in hand, 'to give water to the wounded, succour any we can, smash all their weapons, and leave them to fate or their returning friends.'

He, with most of his party, approached the place where the victims of the fusilade lay, and, so far as blood, wounds, and agony went, they presented a very dreadful scene, and yet a trifling one when compared with that witnessed so lately in the trenches of Tel-el-Kebir.

Many were shot outright; others, severely wounded, lay wallowing and choking in their blood, and they regarded the victors with a firm, scowling, and defiant expression in their long, thin, tawny faces, and black, bright, glittering eyes, that made them look, as Allan said, like dying eagles.

But, before anything could be done for the survivors, the fatal episode of the day took place.

A little way apart from the group of death and agony, lay a Bedouin, who, though untouched, was partly under his horse, from which he freed himself, and then Cameron advanced to take him prisoner. He was an athletic and gigantic fellow, all bone and sinew, lithe as a serpent, and active as the antelope of his native deserts.

Drawing a long pistol from his girdle, he levelled it at Cameron, but it snapped, on which he flung it furiously at the head of the latter, who ducked, and escaped it.

Several Highlanders now rushed forward, as he had drawn a large and heavy Damascus sabre, but they paused with their hands on their locks when Cameron cried,

'Stand back, my lads, and leave him to me!' And in a moment both their blades were flashing in the setting sun, for Cameron fell upon him claymore in hand.

'May your head be covered by a whirlwind of fire!' hissed the Bedouin in Arabic, through his clenched teeth, while he hewed away without the least intention of surrendering. The hood of his red and white striped burnous had fallen back, and his whole head and face, with flashing eyes and gleaming teeth, were displayed to view.

Cameron was a skilful swordsman, but so was the Bedouin, who was his superior in height and muscular power. Their blades struck red sparks from each other. Cameron forgot to draw his long dirk: but he had 'Sir Garnet's' ugly jack-knife in his left hand, for parrying purposes. How the combat would have terminated, it is difficult to say, but a vile Bedouin, who lay wounded close by, armed with a long, straight sword, with the last effort of expiring nature, writhed himself up from the sand, ran poor Cameron through the body from behind, and fell back dead.

With a hollow groan, Cameron fell backward across him, and was about to receive a finishing stroke from his antagonist, when the latter was shot through the head by Sergeant Farquharson.

This catastrophe rather cooled Allan's humane ideas of succouring the wounded. Very few of the Highlanders had been touched, and these but slightly. However, it seemed as if Cameron was dying. He was speechless, and his mouth at times was filled with blood. It was impossible then to ascertain the exact nature of his wounds, or what part of the body was injured. Allan, full of tenderness, anxiety, and the deepest commiseration, formed a pad of his handkerchief, and, using his sash as a bandage, endeavoured, so far as in him lay, to stop the bleeding, while a litter was improvised by a couple of rifles, with a blanket stretched over them; and the party began to fall back on Matarieh, but often had to halt, for the agony of Cameron was great, and Allan began to despair of getting him conveyed in life to Matarieh, which, as we have said, was nearly ten miles distant, while, to enhance their difficulties, a troop of nearly a hundred Bedouins were visible, pouring down a rocky gorge of the Jebel Mokattam range; so nothing was left to Allan but to continue his retreat, which they seemed slow or disinclined to follow up.

Yet their presence was fraught with danger, especially after the sun, with its usual rapidity in these regions, went down like a red, fiery ball, and the lurid haze exhaled from the flat desert on which the darkness fell.

The stars were coming out in the blue zenith; the dew was already beginning to fall; long and dark shadows lay across the plain, but the line of the railway was a sure guide back to Matarieh and the vicinity of Heliopolis.

Every step of his bearers elicited a moan of pain from Cameron, and these went to the heart of his friend as if they had been the utterances of a brother, while now and then the sufferer muttered his thanks to the soldiers for their care and kindness, and his regret for the trouble he gave them after a day of toil, and his fears that he was retarding their retreat and thereby involving them in danger. Of his own pain or peril he never uttered a word.

Constellations new to him and his comrades were in the sky now--a vast blue dome that stretched far, far away, all bright with glorious stars.

At last it was absolutely necessary to halt for a time, for all thought the sufferer was dying, and the Highlanders said that if the Bedouins came on again they would form square round him; and soon it became too evident that Evan Cameron was lying 'on the bleak neutral ground between life and death.'

Accustomed though they were to suffering and slaughter, the Highlanders stood around him leaning on their muskets, full of commiseration, and looking attentively at the pale face of the dying officer and back to the desert where they had last seen the enemy hovering; and more than one wished that the Bedouins would only come on again.

'Has no man among us here any water?' asked Allan, for by this time the tin bottles of the detachment were empty.

A man who was in the act of taking the stopper out of his, paused instantly.

'Captain Graham, here is mine,' said he; 'there are only a drop or two left, but if it was my blood I'd give it for Evan Cameron,' he added, emphatically, with that familiarity which is peculiar to the Highlander, and has no rudeness in it.

'Donald, thank you,' said Allan.

'My mother bides nigh the braes of Stratherroch, and I am not likely to forget that to-night,' said the soldier, with a break in his voice.

Raising Cameron's head gently, Allan put Donald's water-bottle to his lips, and he drank thirstily of the fetid and odious water it contained, 'the Nile soup,' as our men called it.

Refreshed even by it for a few minutes, Evan Cameron spoke to Allan, but in whispers, and, as they seemed to be meant for the ear of the latter alone, the soldiers with one accord drew back a little way.

'I knew from the first that I should never pull through--nor do I wish to do so, Allan,' said he, speaking at long intervals and with a husky effort.

'We have faced death together in many ways, but I wish your case had been mine, Evan, even if it is to be a fatal one.'

'Don't say that, Allan, dear fellow,' replied Evan, with that strange, far-off expression of eye which belongs alone to a fast-ebbing life--an expression which Allan could see even in the starlight as he stooped close over the sufferer, 'my sight is failing me, yet I can in fancy see Eveline--oh! so distinctly, Allan--and I seem to hear her voice--you don't mind me saying this now, lying, as I am here, face to face with God--the voice that seemed to whisper to my heart.'

Allan could only press the clammy hand that never again would grasp the broad claymore. Evan spoke again, but still more brokenly,

'I am not jealous now of my married rival; I only sorrow for the lost future of Eveline; married to an old man whom she may respect but never love, and with whom she cannot have a sympathy in common.'

'You are talking too much, Evan.'

'And thinking of her rather than my prayers. When I am lying here in my long and peaceful sleep, far from my father's grave in bonnie Stratherroch, she will live all the years of a young life, and, in the time to come, will--of course, forget me.'

His voice was almost gone now, yet his eyes dilated when Allan said, with sorrowful emphasis,

'Evan, she will never forget you.'

'Nearer me--come nearer, Allan; I--I want you to tell her--tell her----'

What he was to tell Allan never heard, as the voice of Cameron ceased; a change, perceptible in the clear starlight, was passing over his face; a dew was gathering on his forehead, and dark shadows under his eyes.

'He's gone, sir,' said Sergeant Farquharson, lifting his helmet for a moment in mute reverence. 'Well, Captain Graham, the golden gates have never closed upon a better officer or a braver man! Poor Evan Cameron,' he added, stooping over the body and looking at it earnestly.

Allan cast a long and sad glance at it too; then he laid a hand on the heart; it might be only syncope--no, it did not seem to be that.

The profile of his face in its stillness looked like a classic cameo cut in high relief. His fair, almost golden, hair, clipped close with military precision, retained still its crispy ripple. The brown moustache shading the short upper lip had been somewhat untrimmed of late; but he looked so life-like that Allan almost shuddered as he spread the blanket over him and covered him up--for he felt that in that wretched substitute for a shroud lay one whom he knew his sister--married albeit as she was to another--loved better than life!

It was hard to think of so young and gallant a life being cut short thus by the inexorable scissors of Fate; but he was gone to the 'Land of the leal,' where there can be no sorrow nor thought of sordid things.

'We cannot leave him lying here thus; neither can we carry him off; while there is a chance of these Bedouin devils coming on again. Besides, there are always jackals about,' said Allan, as he took possession of Evan's claymore, dirk, and ring. 'Scoop a hole--a temporary grave in the sand--and cover him up, till we can return by daylight, and bring him into quarters for proper interment.'

The soldiers, with their hands, bayonets, and rifle-butts, hollowed a trench some three feet deep, and therein, rolled in a blanket, they reverently deposited the yet warm form of Cameron, and covered it up with sand.

Allan maintained a grim silence, and, though his heart was full of genuine grief, the remarks of his soldiers pleased him.

'Those who have lived with us and died as he has done will never be forgotten in the regiment, sir,' said Sergeant Farquharson.

'Mourn for the mourner, I have heard my mother say in Gaelic, and not for the dead, as they are at rest and we in tears,' said Donald, as he hooked-on his water-bottle.

'He has none to mourn for him now but one, and she is far away,' remarked Allan, with a swelling in his throat. 'And now fall in, lads.'

The Highlanders marched on their way back to Matarieh in silence, impressed by the recent episode; for, if gallant and reckless fellows in battle, they were thoughtful and full of sorrow for the brave young officer they had lost.

A shot or two, fired apparently at random in the distance, sparkling out redly amid the obscurity, showed that the Bedouins were following them up, and must have passed over the very place where Cameron lay.

The silence of the starry night was upon the world then--upon the ridgy summits of Jebel Mokattam, and darkness now enfolded the desert where Evan Cameron lay in such awful loneliness, without even the grim companionship of the dead--the last Cameron of the old fighting line of Stratherroch.

Two days after, with an ambulance waggon, Sergeant Farquharson, and some of his men, Allan went along the line of the old railway from Matarieh to the place where they had left the body--a place marked in their memory by the presence of two large stones and some shrubs near the embankment--but of these they could find no trace, though they searched for hours, believing they might have passed them or miscalculated the distance.

Nothing was to be seen about the real or supposed spot but sand, smooth and drifted sand everywhere. Thus Allan could but come to the sorrowful conclusion that some species of sand-storm must have swept from the desert south-eastward between the mountain ranges, and buried every trace of the hastily-made grave.