United States or Jamaica ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Here and there the houses had rough balconies, and he caught a glimpse of the Mahdi's tomb, a white-topped domed building looking like a gigantic egg set on end, with four small ones to form corners, some attempt at ornamentation, and for apex what appeared to be a great gilded spear thrust through a couple of brass balls.
Wady Halfa, Korosko, and Assouan, were held with some force, in case the Mahdi's adherents should seek to follow up their victory. The death of the Mahdi, however, and the defeat of his followers at the end of 1885, have together helped to crush the Mahdist movement, and Egypt has been left unmolested. The news of Gordon's death startled not England only, but the whole of the civilised world.
We splashed through one of these little brooks as the sun was setting, and El Mahdi's feet sank in the white sand. I watched the crystal water go bubbling over his hoofs and then pour with a gush into the shoe tracks which held the print like a mould. We left a silver trail or, now when the sun was slanting, a golden trail, big with the air of enchanted ventures.
"I first exchanged the robe for one marked with the Mahdi's patches. It was already smeared with blood. I then carried the body of the man whose robe I had taken off, for some distance. I laid him down on his face, thinking that the absence of the patches would not be seen.
Suakin was also strongly held, and the Mahdi's forces came no farther south; but the whole of the immense territory from the Second Cataract to the Equatorial Lakes was overrun by his fanatic hordes, who carried "fire, the sword, and desolation" far and wide over that unhappy land.
Mahdi's make-up did Professor Thunder great credit it was grotesquely inhuman. The shape of the costume demanded a stooping attitude and shambling gait. Only in a good light and at close quarters could the deception be seen. People came running from all directions. A cab horse backed in terror before the monster, reared, plunged furiously and bolted into a peanut stall.
"Why did you not reply to our knocking?" El Bakhat asked angrily. "Is this your hospitality to strangers?" "My lord must pardon me," he said submissively; "but it was but last week that a party of the Mahdi's soldiers came along here and stripped the village of all it possessed, and drove off its bullocks and sheep. Save our grain, we have nought that we can call our own."
Whilst our batteries were hurling death and destruction from the zereba at the Khalifa's army, Major Elmslie's battery of 50-pounder howitzers was battering the Mahdi's tomb to pieces and breaching the great stone wall in Omdurman.
The garrison were massacred, enslaved, or incorporated in the Mahdi's army. The town was plundered and the trade destroyed. For nearly ten years an Arab force occupied the ruins and a camp outside them. Kassala became a frontier post of the Dervish Empire. Its population perished or fled to the Italian territory.
After journeying for some days they passed a plain strewn with skeletons. "You see these," the sheik said; "they are the remains of the army of Hicks Pasha. Here they were attacked by the Mahdi's army. They defended themselves bravely, but they could neither advance nor retreat, and at last they were vanquished by thirst and fatigue. They were slaughtered as they stood.
Word Of The Day