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One of the Arab sheiks of the irregulars was sent to examine the spot, and reported that the Khalifa himself, and almost all his great emirs, lay there dead. With the Khalifa were Ali Wad, Helu, Fadil, two of his brothers, the Mahdi's son, and many other leaders.
"It is very few words that I have been able to pick up. But what are you going to do now?" "That is just what I was wondering when that row took place, and sent all my ideas and reflections spinning. I must sleep on it." "Look here," said Howard, presently. "The chances are that that fellow Daireh has gone to the Mahdi's head-quarters, which are at El Obeid.
But it was too true, for there was another score of prisoners who were mercifully spared from death, but were to suffer the new Mahdi's judgment against them for revolt against the officers appointed by him to be his vice-gerents in the city while he was away. The mercy meted out was that of the tiger, not of the man.
The old Sheikh bowed and left the place, to return in an hour with another completely different account of the state of affairs, and by nightfall he had brought in eight more circumstantial reports, every one of which was a tissue of fables, invented to support or weaken the new Mahdi's power.
In the year 1881 Muhammed Ahmet, a religious leader among the Moslem Arabs in the Central African provinces of Kordofan and Darfur, proclaimed himself as the Mahdi, and called upon the Muhammedans to initiate a holy war. The Mahdi's continued advances were rendered possible by the precarious state of affairs in Egypt.
"It might be a great deal worse," Edgar said to himself as he ate his supper; "the sheik himself does not seem to be a bad fellow; and at any rate I owe him my life for his obstinacy in sticking to me, instead of handing me over to the Mahdi's people. His wife is evidently disposed to be kind, and my work will be no harder than an agricultural labourer's, at any rate as long as we stay here.
He was more concerned to obtain a success than to appear to deserve it; he did not want a moral victory, but a mathematical certainty. So far from following up the dash in the dark, upon Firket or Dongola, with more romantic risks, he decided not to advance on the Mahdi's host a minute faster than men could follow him building a railway.
Her Arab crew soon perceived by the Egyptian flags which were hoisted on the principal buildings, and by the battered condition of the Mahdi's Tomb, that all was not well in the city; and then, drifting a little further, they found themselves surrounded by the white gunboats of the 'Turks, and so incontinently surrendered. The story they told their captors was a strange one.
An expedition was despatched to Suakim, and two bloody battles were fought, but the only result of these was to inflame the zeal of the mahdi's followers and to enable him to capture Berber, the key of the Soudan.
These were the Mahdi's colours; I don't know why, for he was never a Third Trinity man, and had no right to their blazer. Like his impudence! It is true that the colours were generally in dice, not regularly striped. Some of the soldiers did not show the colours, but that was because they had nothing to put them on unless they painted their bodies.
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