152 THE DOWNFALL OF THE DERVISHES the Ottoman Empire, in which millions of Christians have been dominated for centuries by a small but valiant minority of Osmanlis.

When it was known that the Khalifa’s army had postponed the attack, a general feeling of disappointment pervaded the whole zeriba. The men, both white and black, had been as keen as possible; we had all been waiting for the enemy, and he hadn’t come! We were robbed of our show, and it was positively annoying to hear, instead of the warlike commands which had prefaced the afternoon, the pacific order for fatigue parties to leave the zeriba and cut wood for cooking purposes! What awful bathos! From Khalifa to kitchen utensils, from battle and murder to bully beef and biscuit !

Few of the twenty-three thousand men who passed that night within the zeriba are likely to forget it. We felt certain of a battle on the morrow, for all doubts as to whether the Khalifa would stand and fight, or flee away into the uttermost parts of the Sudan, were now set at rest. The two armies actually lay encamped within five miles of each other on an almost dead level! The whole of our force, from the Sirdar downwards, was fully conscious