built fires,
cooked food, lived, and died out-of-doors. So the streets were so
crowded that in places the detachment with difficulty forced its way
through the multitude. Formerly Omdurman was a wretched village; at
present, counting the ives, over two hundred thousand people were
huddled in it. Even the Mahdi and his caliphs were perturbed by this
vast concourse, which was threatened with famine and disease. They
continually despatched to the north expeditions to subjugate localities
and cities, loyal yet to the Egyptian Government.

At the sight of the white children here also resounded unfriendly
cries, but at least the rabble did not threaten with death. It may be
that they did not dare to, being so close to the prophet's side, and
perhaps because they were more accustomed to the sight of prisoners who
were all transported to Omdurman immediately after the capture of
Khartum. Stas and Nell, however, saw hell on earth. They saw Europeans
and Egyptians lashed with courbashes until they bled; hungry, thirsty,
bending under burdens which they were commanded to carry or under
buckets of water. They saw European women and children, who were reared
in affluence, at present begging for a handful of durra or a shred of
meat; covered with rags, emaciated, resembling specters, with faces
swarthy from want, on which dismay and despair had settled, and with a
bewildered stare. They saw how the savages burst into laughter at the
sight of these unfortunates; how they pushed and beat them. On all the
streets and alleyways there were not lacking sights from which the eyes
turned away with horror and aversion. In Omdurman, dysentery and
typhoid fever, and, above all, small-pox raged in a virulent form. The
sick, covered with sores, lay at the entrances of the hovels, infecting
the air. The prisoners carried, wrapped in linen, the bodies of the
newly dead to bury them in the sand beyond the city, where the real
charge of the funeral was assumed by hyenas. Above the city hovered
flocks of vultures from whose wings fell melancholy shadows upon the
illuminated sand. Stas, witnessing all this, thought that the best for
him and Nell would be to die as soon as possible.

Nevertheless, in this sea of human wretchedness and malice there
bloomed at times compassion, as a pale flower blooms in a putrid marsh.
In Omdurman there were a few Greeks and Copts whom the Mahdi had spared
because he needed them. These not only walked about freely, but