THE TRAGEDY OF A KINGDOM 39 fully, the siege being raised by that capable soldier, Abdel Kader Pasha.

Subsequently the Egyptians under Nur Bey were defeated and Sennaar burnt by El Mehrdi Abu Rof, who—says Ohrwalder—was actually a descendant of the ancient Kings of Sennaar, and chief of the powerful Gehena tribe, which for long defied the Mahdi's power.

Possession was regained by the Egyptians, and, on the rise of the Mahdi, Nur Bey conducted the famous defence of the town with 3,000 soldiers, undergoing a siege which terminated in August, 1885, seven months after the fall of Khartoum, 700 men alone remaining. Nur Bey, still living in Omdurman in 1892, escaped the fate of the defenders of Kassala, who were murdered a month later by Osman Digna (still irreconcilable and in captivity at Wady Haifa in 1909), on the fall of that last remaining post.

And what of the remains of the ancient kingdom of Sennaar after a few years of Dervish rule ? The independence inherited of a line of rulers by El INIehrdi Abu Rof stirred him to resist the Mahdi, and his head soon rotted on Omdurman walls. His people were slaughtered in thousands, famine silenced the land, village upon village disappeared for ever, leaving merely a name to be heard by the white traveller of to-day. The granary of the Sudan was reduced to a howling wilderness, and its enfeebled remnants of population shrank to the narrowest limits.