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The great army of Dervishes was dwarfed by the size of the landscape to mere dark smears and smudges on the brown of the plain. Looking east, another army was now visible the British and Egyptian army. All six brigades had passed the Kerreri Hills, and now stood drawn up in a crescent, with their backs to the Nile. The transport and the houses of the village of Egeiga filled the enclosed space.

We got in a nasty corner that morning on the heights of Kerreri, and were so hard pressed by the dervishes in the retreat that the wounded were saved with the greatest difficulty. Bennett was so badly hurt that it took two of us to hold him on my horse; but we got him back to the river and the hospital, and after Khartum fell I picked him up at Fort Atbara.

To the left the river, steel-grey in the morning light, forked into two channels, and on the tongue of land between them the gleam of a white building showed among the trees. Before us were the ruins of Khartoum and the confluence of the Blue and White Niles. A black, solitary hill rose between the Kerreri position and Omdurman. A long, low ridge running from it concealed the ground beyond.

Far away, near the Kerreri Hills, the yellow light of a burning village shot up, unquenched by the rain, and only invisible in the brightest flashes of the lightning. There was war to the southward. The British and Egyptian cavalry, supported by the Camel Corps and Horse Artillery, trotted out rapidly, and soon interposed a distance of eight miles between them and the army.

Such of us as could crawled under sheets of canvas or waterproofs, but these afforded little protection from the driving sheets of falling water. From Sirdar to private none escaped a thorough wetting. The enemy, had he chosen, might have advanced from Kerreri or Omdurman, and been upon us ere an alarm could have been given. Shortly after sunset everybody had to be within the zereba.

There was an old-time prophecy of the Persian Sheikh Morghani, whose tomb is near Kassala, that the English soldiers would one day fight at Kerreri. Mahomed Achmed and Abdullah had further added to the prediction that there they were to be attacked and defeated by the dervishes under the Khalifa. Kerreri plain, therefore, had become a sort of holy place of pilgrimage to the Mahdists.

But the prophecy of the Mahdi exercised a powerful effect on the Khalifa's mind, and while he neglected no detail he based his hopes on the issue of a great battle on the plains of Kerreri, when the invaders should come to the walls of the city.

Colonel Broadwood, however, preferred to retire through the Kerreri Hills to the northward, drawing Osman after him. He replied to that effect. The first position had soon to be abandoned. The Dervishes, advancing in a north-easterly direction, attacked the Kerreri Hills obliquely. They immediately enveloped the right flank of the mounted troops holding them.

Whilst we in the zereba were awaiting, ready and confident of the issue, the oncoming of the enemy, the two regiments of Egyptian cavalry and the Camel Corps, which had advanced on the right to Um Mutragan hills, South Kerreri jebels, like the 21st Lancers at El Surgham on the left were opposing the dervish advance. Their orders were to check the dervish left.

All the fugitives that come in say that the Khalifa will fight, but whether it will be in the defence of Omdurman, or whether he will come out and attack us at Kerreri, none can say. The Khalifa keeps his intentions to himself." "By the bye, Hilliard, I don't think you know my right-hand neighbour; he only joined us an hour before we started, having been left behind at Cairo, sick. "Mr.