Strong fatigue parties from the Egyptian and Soudanese
battalions were, however, employed on the embankments, and the line grew
daily longer. On the 24th of July the first train ran across the
battlefield of Firket; and on the 4th of August the railway was working
to Kosheh.
Kosheh is six miles south of Firket, and consists, like most places in the
'Military Soudan,' of little more than a name and a few ruined mud-huts
which were once a village. On the 5th of July the whole camp was moved
thither from the scene of the action. The reasons were clear and apparent.
Kosheh is a point on the river above the Dal Cataract whence a clear
waterway runs at high Nile to beyond Dongola. The camp at Firket had become
foul and insanitary. The bodies of the dead, swelling and decaying in their
shallow graves, assailed, as if in revenge, the bodies of the living.
The dysentery which had broken out was probably due to the 'green' water of
the Nile; for during the early period of the flood what is known as
'the false rise' washes the filth and sewage off the foreshore all along
the river, and brings down the green and rotting vegetation from the spongy
swamps of Equatoria. The water is then dangerous and impure. There was
nothing else for the army to drink; but it was undesirable to aggravate
the evil by keeping the troops in a dirty camp.
The earliest freight which the railway carried to Kosheh was the first of
the new stern-wheel gunboats.
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