218 THE DOWNFALL OF THE DERVISHES and crowded houses of Omdurman, we should have had the utmost difficulty in driving the enemy out, and could not, in all probability, have occupied Omdurman on the evening of the 2nd. MHouse-to-house fighting is always a costly and dangerous business, and had it taken place, the prophetic estimate popularly attributed to the Sirdar of ‘‘one thousand casualties before Khartum is ours,” might well have been realised in fact. As it was, the Dervishes prepared to take their chance in the open desert, rather than await our onset under a continual fire of fifty-pounder shells which burst amid sheets of flame and clouds of dust, and sent huge fragments for hundreds of yards, wrecking every obstacle in their path.

When the battle was over, the gunboats steamed up side by side with the general advance, and were met at Omdurman by a hot rifle fire from Dervishes concealed in the houses along the margin of the river. The streets leading to the southern exit of the town were by this time crowded with a mass of fugitives. In addition to mounted Baggaras and Dervish infantry, a mob of