arras and the advanced base. No attack had been made upon
the brigade at Akasha. No enterprise was directed against its
communications. This fatal inactivity did not pass unnoticed by Wad
Bishara, the Governor of Dongola; but although he was nominally in
supreme command of all the Dervish forces in the province he had hardly
any means of enforcing his authority. His rebukes and exhortations,
however, gradually roused Hammuda, and during May two or three minor
raids were planned and executed, and the Egyptian position at Akasha was
several times reconnoitred.

Bishara remained unsatisfied, and at length, despairing of infusing
energy into Hammuda, he ordered his subordinate Osman Azrak to supersede
him. Osman was a Dervish of very different type. He was a fanatical and
devoted believer in the Mahdi and a loyal follower of the Khalifa. For
many years he had served on the northern frontier of the Dervish Empire,
and his name was well known to the Egyptian Government as the contriver
of the most daring and the most brutal raids. His cruelty to the
wretched inhabitants of the border villages had excluded him from all
hope of mercy should he ever fall into the hands of the enemy. His
crafty skill, however, protected him, and among the Emirs gathered at
Firket there was none whose death would have given greater satisfaction
to the military authorities than the man who was now to replace Hammuda.

Whether Osman Azrak had actually assumed command on the 6th of June
is uncertain. It seems more likely that Hammuda declined to admit his
right, and that the matter still stood in dispute. But in any case Osman
was determined to justify his appointment by his activity, and about
midday he started from the camp at Firket, and, accompanied by a strong
patrol of camel-men, set out to reconnoitre Akasha. Moving cautiously,
he arrived unperceived within sight of the position at about three
o'clock in the afternoon. The columns which were to storm Firket at dawn
were then actually parading. But the clouds of dust which the high
wind drove across or whirled about the camp obscured the view, and
the Dervish could distinguish nothing unusual. He therefore made the
customary pentagonal mark on the sand to ensure good luck, and so
returned to Firket to renew his dispute with Hammuda, bearing the
reassuring news that 'the Turks lay quiet.'

The force which the Sirdar had concentrated for the capture of Firket
amounted to about nine thousand men