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Updated: June 26, 2025
On they came in unnumbered throngs, until, pressing northwards along the sky-line, their lines also topped the Kerreri Hills to the north of the zariba. Their aim was obvious: they intended to surround the invaders, pen them up in their zariba, and slaughter them there.
His father was a humble priest; yet he contrived to give his son some education in the practices of religion, the principles of the Koran, and the art of writing. Then he died at Kerreri while on a journey to Khartoum, and left the future Mahdi, still a child, to the mercies of the world.
Every one feared that he would hold fast to Omdurman and fight the new crusaders from house to house. Possibly the seeming weakness of the zariba tempted him to a concentric attack from the Kerreri Hills and the ridge which stretches on both sides of the steep slopes of the hill, Gebel Surgham. A glance at the accompanying plan will show that the position was such as to tempt a confident enemy.
It was at Kerreri that the infidel army was to be utterly destroyed, and he may have thought that it would be tempting fate, were he to precipitate an action before the invaders reached the spot where their doom had been pronounced. Even more miserable than night was the hour before dawn.
Only on the north, where the camel-corps fell into an awkward plight among the rocks of the Kerreri slope, had the attack any chance of success; and there the shells of one of the six protecting gunboats helped to check the assailants.
With this object, as the Dervishes approached, he had occupied the Kerreri ridge with the Horse battery and the Camel Corps, holding his cavalry in reserve in rear of the centre.
Amid the roar of the firing and the dust, smoke, and confusion of the change of front, the general found time to summon the officers of the IXth Soudanese around him, rebuked them for having wheeled into line in anticipation of his order, and requested them to drill more steadily in brigade. The three Soudanese battalions were now confronted with the whole fury of the Dervish attack from Kerreri.
In half an hour, the troops went forward again. The field presented a terrible appearance, being thickly dotted with dead, from the Surgham Hill across the plain; and round, by the Kerreri Hills, to the spot where Macdonald's brigade had made their stand.
They had besides blocked the road with a military camp big enough to shelter in huts and tukals several thousand men. Information brought us by natives, spies and deserters, was to the effect, that only a small body of dervishes had been left at Kerreri under Emir Yunis for the purpose of observing the movements of our army.
Jaalin scouts and runners put themselves under the Sirdar's orders to scour the front and flanks of the army, at least up to Kerreri. Colonel Parsons, R.A., was to lead a mixed force of fellaheen soldiers, Abyssinian levies, ex-Italian Ascari, and Arabs from Kassala to attack Gedarif and menace Khartoum from the east.
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