1*3 CHAPTER XXXIV.

THE WHITE NILE EXPEDITION. ON September 7th— the Wednesday'after the great battle— the telegraph line, which had ended at NasriIsland during the campaign, was brought up to Omdurman. Some startling messages passed over it in the course of the same day.

the history of the Soudan. She was oneof the gunboats sent downby Gordon to meet theNile expedition at Metemneh,and it was on boardof her that Lord Charles Beresford went to the rescue of Sir Charles Wilson and his party, and made his splendid fight with the Dervish fort near Wad Habeshi. Early in the morning a steamer was seen coining down theWhite Nile to.vardsKhartoum and Omdurman. She did not belong to the flotilla, and as she approached it could be seen that she had not the trim appearance of the gunboats and stern wheelers. She wassadly in want ofrepairs andpaint,anoldbattered paddlewheelsteamer, of the general type of a Thames penny steamboat. She was, in fact, one of Gordon's "pennysteamers," the Tewfikieh. The captain or reis, on the bridge, and his motleycrew, wore the patched Dervish jibba as their uniform;but from a flagstaff at the bow a large white flag was displayed, for the Dervishes had heard of the fall of Omdurman. and wereready to surrender to the victors.

TheDervish captain had an interesting story to tell. He had gone up the river in company with another of theKhalifa's steamers, the Safia, inthe middle of August. Even then there were rumours of the presence of white men in the Shillukcountry. As the twosteamersapproached Fashoda they saw a fort on the bank over which flew a strange flag. They were fired upon from thelow rampart of the fort,and while the firing wasinprogress they could see that the garrison consisted of black men under white officers. The steamers, not liking this warm reception, turned andran downthe river till they wereout ofrange. They then landed somemen to make inquiries, and were told by the people in a riverside village that a party of eight Europeans with a party of black soldiers, assisted by the Shilluks of the neighbourhood, had driven out the 'mall Dervish garrison, killing about a hundred of them, and had then entrenched themselves at Fashoda. The Tewfikieh then ran back to Omdurman to report to the Khalifa, leaving the Safia to watch the river below Fashoda. The Safia, by the way, is famous in There wereseveralsmall-bore bullets stuck in the timbers of the Tewfikieh, and these were considered to be of the pattern used with the French Lebel rifle. The description that the Dervish reis gave of the flag left little doubt that it was the tricolour. Indeed, after the Dervishes had been questioned by Colonel Wingate and Slatin, he telegraphed in cipher to London,throughLord Cromerat Cairo, that the French had reached Fashoda. But the newspaper correspondents at Omdurman were not allowed to send either full details or definite views on the subject, and very strangely there wasconsiderable doubt amongthe general public here in England as to who the mysterious strangers on the White Nile were. Some, who spoke authoritatively,said they could not be the French, and suggested that they were Belgians from the Free State;or British, belonging to Major MacDonald's expedition from Uganda; or even that the Dervish captain had made a mistake, and taken Abyssinians for white men and Europeans. Considering that it was perfectly wellknown that Marchand had reached Meshra-er-Rek in the summer of 1897, and that Fashoda was his objective, it is strange that there was ever the least doubt as to what flag wasflying on the WhiteNile.

Under the instructions he had already received, the Sirdar prepared to set out for Fashoda with a gunboat flotilla, but before starting expressed a desire that the war correspondents should at once return to Cairo. From such a quarter expressed wishes amount to orders, so after in vain asking to be allowed to go on to Fashoda at their own risk and expense, or even to remain in Omdurman till the expedition returned,the correspondents reluctantly made their hurried preparations for the