KOSHA fate gave satisfaction to many. Osman Azrak was a man of considerable intelligence, and he had enjoyed the protection of the British at Haifa so long as it suited his purpose ; but when he thought that the power of the Dervishes was in the ascendant, he went over to them, and organized raids with conspicuous success. Like Osman Dikna(i.e., Osman of the beard) he always arranged the preliminaries of a Hght, but so soon as the fight began he promptly disappeared by the means of escape which he had taken care to provide.

The destruction of the Dervish frontier army enabled the Sirdar to establish his advance post at Suwarda, about thirty miles south of Kosha, and permitted the continuation of the railway ; all the country round about was cleared of Dervishes, who fled to Dongola, and there is no doubt that the Khalifa realized that a crushing blow had fallen on his troops.

From Ferket to Kosha the railway runs between low hills, and gradually descends to the plain in which that village lies. The neighbourhood of Kosha is famous as the scene of some hard fighting which took place there in 1885. In November of that year the Dervishes had assembled in large numbers at Kosha, and their leaders believed that, since the British had retreated after the fall of Khartum and the murder of General Gordon, it would be comparatively easy to invade Egypt. On December 12th three thousand Dervishes attacked the fort of Mograkeh, a village near Kosha, and though they succeeded in getting within one hundred yards of it, they were repulsed by the three hundred Egyptians who were inside it. On the 15th the Dervishes opened fire on Kosha from a battery erected on the sand-hills on the western bank, but it was soon silenced, and the men with it were driven away. On the 29th General (now Sir) Frederick Stephenson, who commanded the British Army of Occupation, and General Grenfell, the Sirdar of the Egyptian Army, marched killed at Ferket, and he is said by these to have taken a small box of treasure and to have swum across the river with it on his head so soon as he heard the firing begin.

* Vt'kna \s s.ud to mean "ugly "in the Hadanduwa language. This nickname is further said to have been given to him on account of the light colour of the complexion of his father, a Turk or Levantine ; his mother was a Hadanduwa woman.

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