88 WITH KITCHEHEK IH THE SOUDAN hear of no other strong' Dervish force between this and Omdurman. If Mahmud thinks himself strong enough, no doubt he will fightVbuf ii\e and the Khalifa know their business, he will fall back and, with the forces at Omdurman, fight one big battle. The two armies. together will, from what we hear, amount to sixty or seventthbusand, and there is no doubt whatever that with all their faults the beggars can fight. It will be a tough affair, but I believe we shall have some British troops here to help before the final advance. We can depend now on both the Soudanese and the Egyptians to fight hard, but there are not enough of them.

The odds would be too heavy, and the Sirdar is not a man to risk failure. But with a couple of brigades of British infantry there can be no doubt what the result will be, and I fancy that if we beat them in one big fight it will be all up with Mahdism.

“ It is only because the poor beggars of tribesmen regard the Dervishes as invincible that they have put up so long with their tyranny. But the rising of the Jaalin, and the news we get from Kordofan, show that the moment they hear the Dervishes are beaten and Khartoum is in our hands there will be a general rising, and the Dervishes will be pretty well exterminated. We all hope that Mahmud won’t fight, for if he does, and we beat him, the Khalifa and his lot may lose heart and retire before we get to Omdurman, and, once away, the tremendous business of trying to follow him will confront us. Here we have got the river and the railway, but we have no land carriage for an army, and he might keep on falling back to the great lakes for anything that we could do to overtake him. So we all hope that Mahmud will retire to Omdurman without fighting, and with such a host as the Khalifa would then have he would be certain to give battle before abandoning his capital.”

“ They are fine-looking fellows, these blacks,” Gregory said.

They are splendid fellows—they love fighting for fight-