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"You'll lose your head, man," answered Slatin. "Don't be a fool." "I'm keepin' to what me godfathers and godmothers swore for me," answered Macnamara stubbornly. "You must pretend for a while, or you'll be dead in an hour and myself too." "You that's a different nose on me face," answered Macnamara. "But suppose I buck when I get into the mosque no, begobs, I'll not be doin' it!"
Two hours later a little Austrian gentleman stepped forth, and the telegraph hastened to tell the news that Slatin, sometime Governor of Darfur, had escaped from the Khalifa's clutches.
Would he have risked it, had he not been the most simpleminded of men? But you who read men's hearts, sire, as others read a book, you know if I speak truth." Slatin bent his head in humility. The flattery pleased the Khalifa. "Summon Osman Wad Adam and the man to me," he said.
Slatin, seeing his advantage, added: "I told him that you could not spare the time to teach him, sire; but he said that if you would talk to him for a little while every day for a month, after he had studied Arabic for two months, he would be ready to follow your majesty through life and death." "Approach, my son," said the Khalifa to Macnamara suddenly. Macnamara came near.
As a kind of farewell barbecue, whether or not intended by the Khalifa as a warning to his departing general, ten prisoners had their feet and hands cut off in the Beit-el-Mal, and five lost their heads as well as their hands and feet. "It makes my blood run cold," said Slatin softly in English, as Macnamara passed him, walking at his master's stirrup. "Mine's boilin', sir!" answered Macnamara.
Nor could he anticipate as, in the complacency of a man who had done with evil days, he told the story of his rise to the submissive Slatin, that the day would come when he would lead an army of more than fifty thousand men to destruction, and that the night would follow when, almost alone, his empire shrunk again to the saddle-galled donkey, he would seek his home in distant Kordofan, while this same Slatin who knelt so humbly before him would lay the fierce pursuing squadrons on the trail.
A wild discharge of firearms and cannon, and in a few minutes complete silence!" He was not left long in doubt. Some hours afterwards three black soldiers approached, carrying in a bloody cloth the head of General Gordon, which he identified. It is unnecessary to add the gruesome details which Slatin picked up as to his manner of death from the gossip of the camp.
Slatin and Ohrwalder vie with each other in relating its horrors men eating the raw entrails of donkeys; mothers devouring their babies; scores dying in the streets, all the more ghastly in the bright sunlight; hundreds of corpses floating down the Nile these are among the hideous features, The depopulation caused by the scarcity was even greater than that produced by the fighting.
Slatin surrendered on 23rd December 1883; Lupton Bey, commander in the Bahr Gazelle, about the same time, and these successes were enhanced and extended by those achieved by Osman Digma in the Eastern Soudan, where, early in February 1884, while Gordon was on his way to Khartoum, that leader inflicted on Baker Pasha at Tokar a defeat scarcely less crushing than that of Shekan.
More than once he had tried to get a word with Slatin, but that was dangerous for them both most dangerous for Slatin, who was now the servant of the Khalifa Abdullah himself. Slatin was always suspected, and was therefore watched carefully; but the Khalifa knew that Macnamara had no chance to escape, for he had no friends in Cairo, no money, and no more could have bought a camel than a kingdom.
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