donkey, and,
accompanied by his principal wife, a Greek nun as a hostage, and a
few attendants, rode leisurely off towards the south. Eight miles from
Omdurman a score of swift camels awaited him, and on these he
soon reached the main body of his routed army. Here he found many
disheartened friends; but the fact that, in this evil plight, he found
any friends at all must be recorded in his favour and in that of his
subjects. When he arrived he had no escort--was, indeed, unarmed. The
fugitives had good reason to be savage. Their leaders had led them only
to their ruin. To cut the throat of this one man who was the cause of
all their sufferings was as easy as they would have thought it innocent.
Yet none assailed him. The tyrant, the oppressor, the scourge of the
Soudan, the hypocrite, the abominated Khalifa; the embodiment, as he has
been depicted to European eyes, of all the vices; the object, as he was
believed in England, of his people's bitter hatred, found safety and
welcome among his flying soldiers. The surviving Emirs hurried to his
side. Many had gone down on the fatal plain. Osman Azrak, the valiant
Bishara, Yakub, and scores whose strange names have not obscured these
pages, but who were, nevertheless, great men of war, lay staring up at
the stars. Yet those who remained never wavered in their allegiance.
Ali-Wad-Helu, whose leg had been shattered by a shell splinter, was
senseless with pain; but the Sheikh-ed-Din, the astute Osman Digna,
Ibrahim Khalil, who withstood the charge of the 21st Lancers, and others
of less note rallied to the side of the appointed successor of Mohammed
Ahmed, and did not, even in this extremity, abandon his cause. And so
all hurried on through the gathering darkness, a confused and miserable
multitude--dejected warriors still preserving their trashy rifles, and
wounded men hobbling pitifully along; camels and donkeys laden with
household goods; women crying, panting, dragging little children; all in
thousands--nearly 30,000 altogether; with little food and less water
to sustain them; the desert before them, the gunboats on the Nile, and
behind the rumours of pursuit and a broad trail of dead and dying to
mark the path of flight.

Meanwhile the Egyptian cavalry had already started on their fruitless
errand. The squadrons were greatly reduced in numbers. The men carried
food to suffice till morning, the horses barely enough to last till
noon. To supplement this slender provision a