, their
fetters called for no notice in Omdurman. Slaves wore them as a daily
habit, and hardly a street in all that long brown treeless squalid city
was ever free from the clink of a man who walked in chains.

But for the European escape was another matter. There were not so many
white prisoners but that each was a marked man. Besides relays of camels
stationed through the desert, much money, long preparations, and above
all, devoted natives who would risk their lives, were the first
necessities for their evasion. The camels might be procured and
stationed, but it did not follow that their drivers would remain at the
stations; the long preparations might be made and the whip of the gaoler
overset them at the end by flogging the captive within an inch of his
life, on a suspicion that he had money; the devoted servant might shrink
at the last moment. Colonel Trench began to lose all hope. His friends
were working for him, he knew. For at times the boy who brought his food
into the prison would bid him be ready; at times, too, when at some
parade of the Khalifa's troops he was shown in triumph as an emblem of
the destiny of all the Turks, a man perhaps would jostle against his
camel and whisper encouragements. But nothing ever came of the
encouragements. He saw the sun rise daily beyond the bend of the river
behind the tall palm trees of Khartum and burn across the sky, and the
months dragged one after the other.

On an evening towards the end of August, in that year when Durrance
came home blind from the Soudan, he sat in a corner of the enclosure
watching the sun drop westwards towards the plain with an agony of
anticipation. For however intolerable the heat and burden of the day, it
was as nothing compared with the horrors which each night renewed. The
moment of twilight came and with it Idris es Saier, the great negro of
the Gawaamah tribe, and his fellow-gaolers.

"Into the House of Stone!" he cried.

Praying and cursing, with the sound of the pitiless whips falling
perpetually upon the backs of the hindmost, the prisoners jostled and
struggled at the narrow entrance to the prison house. Already it was
occupied by some thirty captives, lying upon the swamped mud floor or
supported against the wall in the last extremities of weakness and
disease. Two hundred more were driven in at night and penned there till
morning. The room was perhaps thirty feet square, of which four feet
were occupied by a solid pillar suppor