slave. It was--men say who
remember it--a hysteria of blood and fanaticism; and precisely as an
hysterical woman is called to her senses by a dash of cold water, so at
the battle of Omdurman the land was reduced to sanity by applied death
on such a scale as the murderers and the torturers at their most
unbridled could scarcely have dreamed. In a day and a night all who had
power and authority were wiped out and put under till, as the old song
says, no chief remained to ask after any follower. They had all charged
into Paradise. The people who were left looked for renewed massacres of
the sort they had been accustomed to, and when these did not come, they
said helplessly: 'We have nothing. We are nothing. Will you sell us into
slavery among the Egyptians?' The men who remember the old days of the
Reconstruction--which deserves an epic of its own--say that there was
nothing left to build on, not even wreckage. Knowledge, decency,
kinship, property, tide, sense of possession had all gone. The people
were told they were to sit still and obey orders; and they stared and
fumbled like dazed crowds after an explosion. Bit by bit, however, they
were fed and watered and marshalled into some sort of order; set to
tasks they never dreamed to see the end of; and, almost by physical
force, pushed and hauled along the ways of mere life. They came to
understand presently that they might reap what they had sown, and that
man, even a woman, might walk for a day's journey with two goats and a
native bedstead and live undespoiled. But they had to be taught
kindergarten-fashion.

And little by little, as they realised that the new order was sure and
that their ancient oppressors were quite dead, there returned not only
cultivators, craftsmen, and artisans, but outlandish men of war, scarred
with old wounds and the generous dimples that the Martini-Henry bullet
used to deal--fighting men on the lookout for new employ. They would
hang about, first on one leg, then on the other, proud or uneasily
friendly, till some white officer circulated near by. And at his fourth
or fifth passing, brown and white having approved each other by eye, the
talk--so men say--would run something like this:

OFFICER (_with air of sudden discovery_). Oh, you by the hut, there,
what is your business?

WARRIOR (_at 'attention' complicated by attempt to salute_). I am
So-and-So, son of So-and-So, from such and such a place.

OFFICER. I hear. And ...?

WARRIOR (