THE RECONOUEST OF THE SOUDAN. 171 In the darkness of the gathering night the Sirdar made his way to the bivouac. There, stretched on the gravel of the river-bank, beside Colonel Wingate, he dictated to the latter, by the light of an inch of candle, the short telegraphic dispatch that was to tell England of the long-expected victory. It was taken down the Nile by a gunboat to be put upon the wire at Nasri. In the great bivouac,guarded by only a few sentries,the victorious army slept in the moonlight the deep sleep of wearied men. It was far into thenight before Omdurman wasequally quiet. Now and then the rifle-shots rang out. There were scenes of riot as the townsfolk plundered the houses of fugitive emirs. A great granary, the wall of which had been breached by a shell, was looted by a crowd, who carried off the sacks of grain on their back-, with no one to hinder them. Gradually Maxwell's Soudanese and some of the Jaalin fnendlies restoredorder, and the weariedsoldiers bivouacked for the night in the wider streets and the courtyards of mosque and palace.

There was no rest for the surgeons. They wen.-busy all night long by shaded candle-lamps in the ambulances and the floating hospital barges. Far off in the moonlight Abdullahi was fleeing to the southward, gathering as he went a bandof his moredevoted adherents, who had survived the dangers of that last terrible day of militant Mahdism. Nor was there any rest for theEgyptian cavalry and camel corps, who were urging their tired horses and camels in pursuit, while on the river the gunboats, with their electric light ablaze, worked their way slowly against the swift, dark current of the Nile.

cavalry, Tudway s camel corps, and some of the gunboats to pursue to the south and eastward in the hope of overtaking the fugitive Khalifa. Slatin Fasha,and some of the Jaalin friendlies, wentwith the pursuers.

LeavingMaxwell's brigade to hold the town and keep order, the Sirdar directed the rest of the troops to withdraw from the suburbs and bivouac for the night in the open. Omdurman was a pestilential place. Slatin,in his description of it,had in no way exaggeratedthe filth and horrorof its mud-walledstreets.

From the mosque the Sirdar made his way to the prison. There he found, in chains, Charles Neufeld, the German trader who had ventured into theSoudan in 1887, andhadbeen a captive ever since, wearing his heavychains for eleven years; so that when they were struck off he at first found it hard to balance himself without the weight of them. There was also an Italian and some Greeks, and more than a hundred Abyssinians taken prisoners in the battle where King Johannes was defeated and killed by the Dervishes. Other prisoners were Egyptian-Soudanese who had incurred the suspicion of the Khalifa. Among these was Ibrahim Pasha Fauzi, who had been staff officer to General Gordon during the siege of Khartoum. He had been a prisoner since the fall of the city, and had been cruelly tortured by order of the Mahdi in order to force him to confess where he had hidden his money during the siege. By a curious coincidence he was brought on board the Mchk to have his chains struck off by the ship's armourer, and he was thus restored to freedom in the presence of Gordon's nephew, who commanded the gunboat.

HOLES IN THE DOME OF H Dl'S TOMB MADE BY BRITISH SHELLS.