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They say it is death to pick up any of the sacks thereabouts, if a stray one should float by you. It has been rather a fashion of our travellers to apologise for Turkish life, of late, and paint glowing agreeable pictures of many of its institutions. I saw, at the mausoleum of the late Sultan Mahmoud's family, a good subject for a Ghazul, in the true new Oriental manner.
It was agreed there were to be no subsequent reprisals by either side, and that hostages were not to be released until after Mahmoud's army corps should have returned to whence it came. Kagig wrote the terms in Turkish by the light of the holocaust in Monty's ancestral keep, and Mahmoud signed the paper in the presence of ten witnesses.
We found Hashi had put him to bed on the windy side of the enclosure, with a hard, stiff camel-mat under him, one over his body, and a third on his head. We soon moved him and wrapped him in blankets, and my husband having got some sacks and other things as a pillow, Hashi put them on the top of Mahmoud's head.
The sun in Mahmoud's country was extremely hot. It stood right up above one's head and looked like the little thing that you get in the focus of a burning glass. The sun made it almost impossible to move, except in the early morning or at evening, and even during the night it was not particularly cool. It never rained in this place. There were no rivers and no trees.
Not to tell the prince of Yuleima's whereabouts, after their combined search for her, and the fees the prince had paid him, would be as cruel as it was disloyal. To assist in Mahmoud's finding her would bring down upon his own head if it was still on his shoulders the wrath of the chief of police, as well as the power behind him.
The fighting lasted nearly until dawn, because of the difficulty of conveying Mahmoud's orders to the Turks, and Kagig's orders to our own tree-hidden firing-line. But a little before sunrise the last shot was fired, at about the time when most of the castle walls fell in and a huge shower of golden sparks shot upward to the paling sky.
Sultan Mahmoud's hostility to beards and to flowing robes, to the turban and the jherid, has deprived his capital city of much of its picturesqueness and peculiarity; but still enough remains of eastern manners and costumes to make it one of the most interesting cities in the world to visit and roam over.
Mahmoud's tomb was covered with a black velvet pall, which was elaborately embroidered with silver; it stood within a fancy silver railing; at the sides and corners were silver candlesticks that would weigh more than a hundred pounds, and they supported candles as large as a man's leg; on the top of the sarcophagus was a fez, with a handsome diamond ornament upon it, which an attendant said cost a hundred thousand pounds, and lied like a Turk when he said it.
The bodies of the slain in Mahmoud's zereba at Omdabiya still lay where they fell, unburied, but dried up and mummified by the sun. Natives had stripped the place and carried off everything left behind by us. A number of dervishes were seen lurking about, part of the defeated army of the enemy, who were afraid to return to Omdurman, anticipating that the Khalifa would have them killed.
This was completely successful: the dervishes fled; Shendy, where was Mahmoud's reserve depot, was occupied, and the forts and depot destroyed, and a large number of female prisoners released. Attempts to draw Mahmoud out of his cover were unsuccessful, and the Sirdar decided to attack him.
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