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Updated: May 9, 2025
Believing there was a chance to wreck the railroad and capture outposts and stores, Mahmoud, a nephew and favourite general of the Khalifa's, led a powerful dervish army from Shendy north to raid the country to and beyond Berber. In spite of the gunboats, after disposing of the recalcitrant Jaalins, Mahmoud crossed the Nile at Metemmeh to the opposite bank.
They resembled a plain, of reeds bending before the gusts of wind which precede a storm. When all had entered and were united in solemn prayer, we returned, passing the grand mosque. I stole up to the door, lifted the heavy carpet that hung before it, and looked in. There was a Mevlevi Dervish standing in the entrance, but his eyes were lifted in heavenly abstraction, and he did not see me.
Why my dervish wished to give up his easy-going profession and take over the charge of my horses I never fully determined, but it must have been because he really loved horses and found that as a dervish pure and simple he had very little to do with them.
The first sign that the forces were drawing closer was the cutting of the telegraph-wire by a Dervish patrol on the 6th of September. On the 10th the Sirdar heard that Kerma was strongly held. On the 15th of September the Egyptian cavalry first established contact with the Dervish scouts, and a slight skirmish took place.
"Along the line of foam, the jewelled chain, The largesse of the ever-giving main." R. H. Stoddard. Ramleh, April 27, 1852. We left Beyrout on the morning of the 22d. Our caravan consisted of three horses, three mules, and a donkey, in charge of two men Dervish, an erect, black-bearded, and most impassive Mussulman, and Mustapha, who is the very picture of patience and good-nature.
The Turkish dandy wears a tassel to his fez about three times larger than the regulation size, and he binds it carefully down to the fez with a red and yellow silk handkerchief; he wears a jaunty-looking short jacket of bright blue cloth, cut behind so that it reaches but little below his shoulder-blades; the object of this is apparently to display the whole of the multifold kammerbund, a wonderful, colored waist-scarf that is wound round and round the waist many times, and which is held at one end by an assistant, while the wearer spins round like a dancing dervish, the assistant advancing gradually as the human bobbin takes up the length.
He had had many skirmishes with Dervish parties, scouring the country for food, and his arrival was very welcome. Gregory was recommended to take a river trip, to recover his health; and left on a steamer going up with stores, and some small reinforcements, to Colonel Lewis.
The date was the 25th of August. Behaving with great steadiness, and helped by Shilluks, after a stiff fight the dervishes were driven off, after losing a number of men, by Marchand's little garrison. "If they had had cannon," said the dervish skipper to me, "they fired so well that they would have sunk our steamers."
It shone brightly over and around our bivouac, south of Kerreri village, or near Um Mutragan, according to the cartographers. The north end of our camp lines approached the river just 500 yards south of the ruined dervish redoubt of Kerreri. Sentinels were posted along the irregular-shaped triangle, or, shall I call it, broken semi-circle, within which the army lay.
"Can the young Excellency say for certain that the Emir and his friends will return?" continued the Sheikh. "Surely it is more likely that the dervish army will be scattered like dust before the desert wind. Think of the long preparations that have been made, of the steady, slow advance of the English army.
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