ting the roof. There was no window
in the building; a few small apertures near the roof made a pretence of
giving air, and into this foul and pestilent hovel the prisoners were
packed, screaming and fighting. The door was closed upon them, utter
darkness replaced the twilight, so that a man could not distinguish even
the outlines of the heads of the neighbours who wedged him in.

Colonel Trench fought like the rest. There was a corner near the door
which he coveted at that moment with a greater fierceness of desire than
he had ever felt in the days when he had been free. Once in that corner,
he would have some shelter from the blows, the stamping feet, the
bruises of his neighbour's shackles; he would have, too, a support
against which to lean his back during the ten interminable hours of
suffocation.

"If I were to fall! If I were to fall!"

That fear was always with him when he was driven in at night. It worked
in him like a drug producing madness. For if a man once went down amid
that yelling, struggling throng, he never got up again--he was trampled
out of shape. Trench had seen such victims dragged from the prison each
morning; and he was a small man. Therefore he fought for his corner in a
frenzy like a wild beast, kicking with his fetters, thrusting with his
elbows, diving under this big man's arm, burrowing between two others,
tearing at their clothes, using his nails, his fists, and even striking
at heads with the chain which dangled from the iron ring about his neck.
He reached the corner in the end, streaming with heat and gasping for
breath; the rest of the night he would spend in holding it against all
comers.

"If I were to fall!" he gasped. "O God, if I were to fall!" and he
shouted aloud to his neighbour--for in that clamour nothing less than a
shout was audible--"Is it you, Ibrahim?" and a like shout answered him,
"Yes, Effendi."

Trench felt some relief. Between Ibrahim, a great tall Arab of the
Hadendoas, and Trench, a friendship born of their common necessities had
sprung up. There were no prison rations at Omdurman; each captive was
dependent upon his own money or the charity of his friends outside. To
Trench from time to time there came money from his friends, brought
secretly into the prison by a native who had come up from Assouan or
Suakin; but there were long periods during which no help came to him,
and he lived upon the charity of the Greeks who had sworn conversion to
the Mahdist faith