8o EGYPT AND THE SOUDAN.

approach of the Mahdi; that Arabs want food; that regulars mean to desert when they get an opportunity. With the reiterated request that I may not have any Egyptians, Turks, or Circassians sent back to mc, I end this journal." Then comes the signature, the date (Oct 20), and a line saying "the sunset to-night ends the year 1301 and begins 1302."

Other journals, or rather separate volumes of the journal, from the loth of September (the date of the departure of Stewart, Herbin, and Power from Khartum for Dongola via Berber) to the 30th of September had been sent by steamer for Berber via Shendy, addressed "to Lieut.-col. Stewart, C.M.G., or chief ot the staff, Lord Wolseley, C.B." A third, to the 12th of October, similarly addressed, was sent by the Tewfikiyeh to Metammeh. A fourth to the 20th of October, to Shendy in a steamer; and the fifth and sixth from 20th of October to 5th of November, and from 5th of November to 14th December, addressed to "chief of the staff of the expeditionary staff for the relief of the garrison," left in the Bordein for Metammeh on the 5th of November and the 15th of December. These journals were now (22d of January, 1885) handed over to Sir Charles Wilson by the officer commanding" the steamer. The last letters had been forwarded by the same steamer, and, with the last volume of the journal, had been intrusted to a Greek.

The entries in the later books were growing more and more significant. On October 2 2d a letter from the Mahdi reached Gordon professing to relate how he had cajtured the Abbas steamer and the post. Gordon replied that he did not care who had surrendered nor who had been captured. He did not, in fact, believe in the capture of the Abbas, and was under the impression that the papers and letters, a long list of which the Mahdi sent to him, declaring them to have been seized, were not in the Abbas at all, but were taken from a spy whom he had sent out from Khartum, the same man who had brought him the news from Dongola of the British advance. This man, he said, had been caught at Metammeh and killed, having, when drunk, let out that he came from Gordon.

The Mahdi's letter, at all events, showed that a large number