160 KHARTOUM CAMPAIGN.

themselves to the task of checking the Khalifa’s attack. Colonel Long had so disposed the cannon and Maxims that the guns rendered invaluable help. At that period the main body of the dervishes moved forward more carefully, taking cover and evidently watching the issue of Yacoub’s and Wad Melik’s assaulting columns.

The army of white flags, led by Yacoub and Wad Melik, exhibited dash, courage, and_ persistence. Never was a column of men so hammered and mutilated and probably so surprised. They were torn and thrown about as puppets before the hurricane of shell fire, and laid in windrows like cut grain before the hail of the Lee-Metfords. Twelve hundred short yards away, Surgham’s bare slopes were being literally covered with corpses and writhing wounded. In sheer blundering brutishness, the ferocious dervishes tried to stem the storm. Wave followed wave of men, they surged together, inviting greater disaster, but always striving to get nearer us. Their front had covered the whole slopes of Jebel Surgham and their left overlapped part of the Khalifa’s right. Death was reaping a gigantic harvest. Hecatombs of slain were being spread everywhere in front. The fight was terrible, the slaughter dreadful. So far we had scarcely - suffered loss, only a few of the enemy’s riflemen having paused and thought of hring at us) Muskets they had discharged in the air, after their manner, when advancing from their encampment. But that is one of their customs, employed to work up a proper warlike ardour. Viewed from our side, it had been so far