The Cairo correspondent of the Times states in Thursday's paper
that he has received some trustworthy information, on the authority of a competent eyewitness, concerning the Turkish forces concentrated around Akabah early in May last. At the time when, under pressure from us, the Turks assented to evacuation, they had, it appears, at least six thousand men on the frontier. In spite of frequent accidents on the Hejaz Railway, at least twelve mountain guns had reached Akabah from Damascus. "More extra- ordinary still, four heavy pieces—to judge from the wheel- tracks, of at least 41 calibre—had been hauled over the desert from Mean [the nearest point on the Hejaz Rail- way] and conveyed to Tabah, two by land and two slung under a dhow, by which they were dropped in shallow water and immediately dragged up and mounted in embrasured field fortifications." New wells, we are also told, were sunk at Akabah and Tabah, and the troops, though ragged, were well fed and well armed. The capacity of the Turks for moving troops, and, as we see, even heavy artillery, across deserts is a fact which we trust is being taken into careful consideration by those who are inclined to believe, judging by the data which govern European armies, that it would be impossible for a Turkish force of any size to penetrate the desert which lies between the Turkish frontier and the Suez Canal. If, in almost absolute secrecy, six thousand men and twelve mountain guns and four large pieces of artillery could be accumulated at so isolated and inaccessible It place as Akabah, it seems to us rash to declare that if the Turks were bent on making a supreme effort, they could not do what the Grand Vizier did during Napoleon's occupation of Egypt, and what some forty years afterwards Ibrahim Pasha accom- plished with no very great difficulty.
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