OMDURMAN, STRONGHOLD OF THE MAHDI After the siege and capture of Khartum the people who had held out against the Mahdists were put to the most unspeakable tortures, all of them, that is, except the young women and girls. These were reserved for the Mahdi’s harem. For weeks after the battle there went on in his camp at Omdurman the business of choosing from the fairest for his own establishment, while the ones he rejected were turned over to his chief favourites and ad¬ visers. After Mohammed Ahmed's death, which occurred close on the heels of his victory, the Khalifa had the Mahdi’s widows and all the women of his harem imprisoned in a high-walled compound guarded by eunuchs. None was allowed to marry or go out into the world again.

The Omdurman of the present, which is laid on prac¬ tically the same lines as that of the past, covers almost the same ground, although it has much fewer people. During my trip of to-day I climbed to the top of the old palace of the Khalifa, and took a look over the city.

The houses stretch along the Nile for seven or eight miles, and the water front is fringed with a thicket of boats. Some of the town is on the main stream, and reaches out from the river in all directions. It is a city of mud in every sense of the word. Of its many thousand houses there are not a score which are of more than one story, and you can count on your fingers the houses made of burnt brick. When I first rode through it I asked my guide if the holes in the walls had been made by cannon-balls at the time of the fighting. “Why, man," he replied, “those are the windows. ” Most of the houses are flat roofed, with drain pipes extending out over the street so that when it rains the water pours down on the necks of the passers-by. The one-story mud houses have 189