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Updated: June 2, 2025
To this Lord Salisbury replied next day: "Her Majesty's Government cannot decline to assist in forwarding a message from the French Agent in Egypt to a French explorer who is on the Upper Nile in a difficult position, and your Excellency is authorised to inform M. Delcassé that Her Majesty's Acting Agent at Cairo will be instructed to transmit to Omdurman immediately any such message, and at the same time to request Sir H. Kitchener to forward it thence to its destination by any opportunity which may be available.
It was regarded as doubtful whether he would be able to employ any of the machine guns in the dervish armoury. Of all Gordon's "penny steamers" only one, it was said, was serviceable, and she was kept under steam night and day at Omdurman.
He was very angry, but I cut him short by saying: "'This is our house at present, sir; and, unless you leave it at once, I shall call the gardener in and order him to eject you." "I am not surprised at what you say, Aunt, for I met the fellow myself, on the way up to Omdurman; and found him an offensive cad.
For several generations they have never had a chance of being in action. They were fairly spoiling for a fight, and it was hard, at the last moment, to have the road to glory closed in their faces for the deficiencies of the few. He whom Arabs and blacks of the whole Soudan call the "Grand Master of the Art of Flight," our old friend Osman Digna, was with the Khalifa in Omdurman.
For the rest there was a wide-rolling, sandy plain of great extent, surrounded on three sides by rocky hills and ridges, and patched with coarse, starveling grass or occasional bushes. By the banks of the river which framed the picture on the left stood a straggling mud village, and this, though we did not know it, was to be the field of Omdurman. It was deserted.
With these introductory reflections we may return to the theatre of the war. On the 7th of September, five days after the battle and capture of Omdurman, the Tewfikia, a small Dervish steamer one of those formerly used by General Gordon came drifting and paddling down the river.
Out in the desert there was only the life-giving air, the opal sands, the plaintive evening sky, the eager morning breeze, the desolated villages, and now and then in the vast expanse, stretching hundreds and hundreds of miles south, an oasis as a gem set in a cloth of faded gold. It would have seemed to any natural man better to die in the desert than to live in Omdurman.
There was also the final message to the Sovereigns of the Powers, undated, and probably written, if at all, by Gordon, during the final agony of the last few weeks, perhaps when Omdurman had fallen. It was worded as follows:
Ethne looked quickly at Durrance. "The go-between?" she asked, and then she said, "I think I begin to understand," and pulled herself up abruptly. "You mean the Arab who can come and go between Omdurman and the Egyptian frontier?" "Yes. He is usually some Dervish pedlar or merchant trading with the tribes of the Soudan, who slips into Wadi Halfa or Assouan or Suakin and undertakes the work.
The rest of the Xth Battalion followed as soon as other steamers were set free from the business of taking the British division to the Atbara and bringing supplies to Omdurman. The progress of the expedition up the river resembled a triumphal procession.
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