CLOSE OF CAMPAIGN. 239 and chain crusader-like head-pieces seem all to have drifted south. There were hundreds of dervish battle flags, including several duplicate black silk banners such as the Khalifa carried during the action, and thousands of native spears, swords, and shields. In short, it would be easier to tell what was not in that extraordinary store-house than what was. Among other articles I saw were: Ivory, powder, percussion caps, old lead, copper, tin, bronze, cloth, looms, pianos, sewing machines, agricultural implements, boilers, steamengines, ostrich feathers, gum, hippopotamus hides, iron and wooden bedsteads, drums, bugles, field glasses — Lieutenant Charles Grenfell’s, lost at El Teb in the Eastern Soudan in 1883, were found there —bolts, zinc, rivets, paints, india-rubber, leather, boots, knapsacks, water-bottles, flags, and clothes’ There were three state coaches—one of them might at a pinch have served for the Lord Mayor—and an American buggy. They needed a little retrimming, but there was harness and material enough to have rigged out the four vehicles in style. In short, the arsenal held the jettisoned cargo of the whole aforetime Egyptian Soudan, with much besides drawn from Abyssinia and Central Africa. Truly, the Khalifa must have been a strange man, with a fine acquisitive instinct abnormally cultivated.

Neufeld, quite contrary to Slatin Pasha’s way of speaking, declared to me that the Khalifa was not at all a bad sort of man, nor an exceptionally cruel Arab task-master, and certainly not a monster. The Khalifa, he said, had often come and chatted with him.