88 KHARTOUM CAMPAIGN.

of old officers and men who went through the terrible Bayuda Desert campaign. Most of them would have sacrificed much to have been in at the death of Mahdism.

Metemmeh had been made a slaughter-pen by the dervishes under Mahmoud. It was truly an awful Golgotha. Dead animals lay about in all directions in thousands, without and within the long, straggling, deserted town. I rode up and looked at the remains of the little fort and the loopholed walls on the south end of Metemmeh, close to which I had ridden on 21st January 1885, and got hotly fired at for my pains. Then I walked over the ruins of the Guards’ triangular fort at Gubat. The place was still capable of defence, and the trenches and rifle-pits were much as we left them on 13th February with General Buller. As for the graves, they were intact. The big earthwork we all helped to raise near the river was covered with water, except a corner of the western parapet.

It was, however, partly thrown down, and the ditch and slopes were overgrown with grass and_ bushes.

Then I rode away to Abu Kru battlefield and had a _ look at what remained of the zereba, the little detached fort I had asked might be built, and the graves of our dead. Some of these had been rifled. Heaps of dead animal bones lay about, for we lost many camels that 19th January 1885. The enemy had gathered up and buried all their own dead. So overgrown was the place that it was barely recognisable. I stood, however, again where Stewart received nis fatal wound, where Cameron, of the