WARS OF THE NINETIES. 120 It was feared that theresult of the fall of Omdurman might be a Dervish invasion of the outlying districts of the Free State, for some expected that the Khalifa would retreat from Omdurman without fighting,and try to establish himself in some other part of Central Africa. Others, while predicting that he would make a labour and difficulty with which Captain Marchand gothis boats across the watershed between the Congo and the Nile, and down the Sueh river to Meshra-er-Rek on the Bahr-el-Ghazal. He had, as we have seen,reached this pointin the summerof 1897. Meshra-er-Rek is a small group of huts on an island in the river, its THE CAMERONS MARCHING TO THE FRONT AND WELCOMED BY THE ejTH SOUDANESE.

fight, and a hardone, thought it very likely that he might escape with a considerable band of followers, rally other adherents of his tribe on the way,and finally fall upon oneor other of the " stations" or detached garrisons that the Free State hadestablished towards theNile.

importance being due to the fact that it the days before the Mahdist revolt, theport of the Bahr-el-Ghazal province. Steamers reached it from Khartoum at high Nile, and it was the centre to which native craft brought their goods to be transhipped and sent clown the river. If one looksonly at the map it seems at first strange that Marchand, once he had occupied Meshra-er-Rek and got his steam-launch on the river there, couldnot go on to Fashoda ina few days. But the navigation of all the branches of the Nile for some hundreds of miles above This danger was, however,in any case minimised by the presence of French troops in the Bahr-el-Ghazal, the region through which the Khalifa must retire if he tried to reach the east of the Congo territory. In a previous chapter something has been said of the infinite