aly will shortly take possession of the weakly defended Kassala,
but accurate information of occurrences in the Eastern Sudan is more
likely to be received in Cairo than in Omdurman.

CHAPTER X.

THE ESCAPE OF FATHER BONOMI.

Ohrwalder continues to describe his personal experiences--Mahmud
the emir of El Obeid--His unsuccessful attempts to entrap the
Nubas--The arrival of Olivier Pain in El Obeid--His motives in
joining the Mahdi--His journey towards Omdurman--His sad
fate--Lupton Bey arrives at El Obeid from the Bahr el Ghazal--He is
sent to Omdurman and thrown into chains--Life in El Obeid--The
escape of Father Bonomi--Ohrwalder's solitude--The death of the
Khojur Kakum.

I must now return to the narrative of my own personal experiences, which
I broke off in order to follow those events of the Mahdi's career in
which I did not take part.

Before the Mahdi left Rahad, I was again handed over to yet another
master; this was Sherif Mahmud, the Mahdi's uncle, and Governor of
Kordofan, and I was put into his charge when he came to Rahad to see the
Mahdi off. I stayed a few days with Mahmud at Rahad. I was then in a
wretched state of health; to my horror I discovered black spots on my
body, my teeth were chattering, and then I knew that I had scurvy. I
longed to escape to the Dobab hills, but my guards were always with me,
and I could not succeed.

At length Mahmud started back for El Obeid, and he gave me one of the
few surviving mules of the Hicks expedition, which had been wounded by a
bullet in the neck and which had never healed. The heavy rain had
entirely changed the aspect of the country, which was now a mass of
green, and under any other circumstances the journey would have been
pleasant enough. We were twice overtaken by terrible thunder-storms,
which obliged us to halt, as the heavy rain made travelling impossible;
at night we had to sleep on the wet ground.

As we approached El Obeid we heard the war-drums beating, to announce
the Governor's arrival. The great sandy plain around was transformed
into green fields planted with dokhn. We halted for a time under the
leafy Adansonia tree, under which the Mahdi's tent had been pitched, and
I noticed that the entire bark of the tree had been peeled off. I
afterwards learnt that the people believed the Mahdi's presence had
hallowed the tree, and that in consequence the bark had been stripped
off and boiled, the li