238 KHARTOUM CAMPAIGN.

able. The common people who saw the remains. almost doubted their senses, for it had been given out that the Mahdi had merely gone off on a visit to heaven and would shortly return. That his body was found surprised them, as they thought he had gone aloft in the flesh, the object of the tomb being to mark the spot where he took leave of the earth and would return to it. Perhaps it may be deplored that Mohamed Achmed’s remains were broken up, part being cast into the Nile, whilst the head and other portions of the body were retained for presentation, it is said, to medical colleges. There were those who thought that the wisest course would have been to expose the remains for all to see them who cared to, and then to hand them over to the natives to bury in one of their cemeteries as if he had been an ordinary man. But the Soudan is not Europe, nor are its inhabitants amenable to measures eminently satisfactory to civilised northern races. The tomb was subsequently levelled to the ground by an explosion of gun-cotton and the débris was cleared away.

I had a good look over the Khalifa’s war arsenal. There were plenty of cannon, old and new, as well as machine guns, rifles, pistols, and fowling pieces of all kinds. Musical instruments, war-drums, elephants’ tusks used as horns, coats of chain-mail old and new, and steel helmets. Most of the latter are quite modern, being part of 600 supplied by a London firm of sword makers—Wilkinson & Co., Pall Mall, to a former Khedive’s body-guard. Somehow these plate