THE BATTLE OF OMDURMAN. 165 fusilade that ought to have mown down every blade of halfa-grass near. But Maxwell's men seemed not quite to get the range. The flag and flagstaff were riddled with bullet holes, and the dead were being piled around. Still, dervish after dervish sprang to uphold the black banner of Mahdism. A _herculean black grasped the staff in one hand, and leaned negligently against it for what appeared to be the space of five or ten minutes,—probably less than one minute,—ere the soldiers managed to give him his final quietus. Then it was that the remnant of the army of the Khalifa began to melt away. It was more than human nature could bear. The dense columns had shrunk to companies, the companies to driblets, which finally fled westward to the hills, leaving the field white with jibbeh-clad corpses like a landscape dotted with snowdrifts.

It was about eight o'clock, and the first action was virtually over and won. Good fortune, as the Sirdar admitted, had in many respects attended him. With a trifling loss of a few hundred men he had discomfited and slain 10,000 of the great dervish army. Presumably, Abdullah had lost the flower of his brave and devoted troops. There were yet a thousand or more of Jehadieh lying about under cover potting at the zereba.

Many of them shammed being wounded to get closer to us. Sharp volleys and more shell-fire duly disposed of those determined snipers, It was from that source, during the critical stages of the battle when the infantry were stopping the Khalifa’s columns, that our chief casualties occurred. Some of these sharp-