“May Allah make him the son of victory!”
For a while the boats went silently along. All was still save for the sliding of the oars against the thole-pins; now and then the furious splashing of water lashed into foam by the tails of disturbed crocodiles was heard. Many of these reptiles had come up the river from the south as far as Khartum; here they found plenty of food, for the river was strewn with corpses, the bodies of those slain when the town was attacked as well as of those who had died of the diseases that raged among the Mahdists, especially among their slaves. The califs had ordered that the water should not be polluted, but this had been completely disregarded, and the bodies that the crocodiles did not deign to touch floated face downward as far as the sixth cataract, and still farther, even as far as Barbary.
But Idris was now thinking of something else; after a while he said:
“We had nothing to eat this morning; are we to go hungry till the hour of prayer, and who will supply us with food later on?”
“You are not a slave,” answered Tadhil; “you can go to the market where provisions are sold. You can get dried meat and perhaps some millet there, but you will have to pay a high price, for, as I have told you, there is a famine in Omdurman.”
“And during my absence wicked people might carry off the children or kill them.”
“The soldiers will guard them; or if you give one of them some money he will go and procure food for you.”
This was not very acceptable advice to Idris, who much preferred accepting money to giving it; but before he answered the boats had landed.
To the children Omdurman looked quite different from Khartum, where there were brick houses several stories high, the “Moodiria” (the palace of the governor, in which the heroic Gordon fell), a church, a hospital, mission-houses, an arsenal, many military garrisons, and a number of large and small gardens with the plentiful, luxuriant vegetation of the equatorial districts, whereas Omdurman looked more like a camp of savages. The fortress, which stood on the northern side of the settlement, had been destroyed by order of Gordon. As far as could be seen the town consisted only of round, ball-shaped huts of millet straw. Narrow hedges of thorns separated these little houses from one another and from the street. Only here and there were tents, which seemed to have been captured from the Egyptians. In other places a few palm mats, under a piece of dirty canvas stretched on bamboo rods, formed the entire dwelling. The inhabitants took refuge within their houses when it rained or when the heat was especially oppressive; but at other times they lived in the open air, where they made their fires, cooked their food, and lived and died. There was so much confusion in the streets that in some places the party had the greatest difficulty in passing through the crowds. Omdurman had formerly been a wretched little village, but the population was now more than twenty thousand, including the slaves. Even the Mahdi and his califs were alarmed that so many people were threatened with hunger and sickness, and expeditions were constantly sent northward to conquer the towns and districts that still remained loyal to the Egyptian Government.
At the sight of the white children the multitude occasionally shouted in a menacing manner, but did not threaten them with death as had the mob in Khartum. Perhaps the rabble did not dare do so in the immediate vicinity of the Mahdi, or they may have become accustomed to seeing prisoners, who had all been taken to Omdurman when Khartum had fallen. But to Stasch and Nell it was a hell on earth. They beheld Europeans and Egyptians bleeding from whiplashings on their bare flesh, and all but starved, used as beasts of burden and dying under their heavy loads. They saw women and children of European birth, from homes of ease and comfort—dressed in rags and lean as ghosts, whose white faces utter wretchedness had turned black—begging for a mouthful of dried meat or a handful of maize, their starved, wild demeanor telling of terror and despair. They noted how the savages scoffed when they saw these miserable prisoners, and how they were pushed about and beaten. In every side street or little lane scenes were enacted from which the eyes turned away in horror and affright. In Omdurman a terrible epidemic of dysentery, typhoid, and smallpox prevailed. The sick, covered with sores, lay at the entrances of the huts, polluting the air. The prisoners were forced to drag through the streets the canvas-shrouded corpses of those who had just died and inter them in the sand outside of the town, where hyenas attended to the real burial. Over the town hovered flocks of vultures, whose lazy-flapping wings cast mournful shadows on the bright sand. When Stasch saw this he thought that the sooner he and Nell died the better it would be for them.