KHARTOUM 245 have been there in Gordon’s time. He had no great hopes of it, but there was just a chance. The flags were still flying over the governor’s house when he landed, and a detachment of Egyptian troops was stationed there. A native officer came down when he landed.

I have come across to question some of the natives,” he said. “ I believe some are still living here.” Oh, yes, Bimbashi ! there are a good many scattered about among the ruins; they come in bringing fruit and flsh for sale. I think they mostly live down by the river-side.” Gregory kept on till he came to the huts occupied by the fishermen and men who cultivated small plots of ground. He found several who had lived at Khartoum when it was captured, and who had escaped the general massacre by hiding till nightfall and then making their way up the river in boats. Hone of them could give him the information he sought, but one suggested that he was more likely to hear from the Greeks and Turks who worked in the Khalifa’s arsenal and foundries, as they had been spared for the services they would be able to render to the Mahdi. Ketuming to Omdurman he went to the machine-shop. Here work had already been resumed, as repairs were needed by several of the gun-boats. He went up to the foreman, a man of some sixty years of age.

“You were engaged in the city during the siege, were you not ? ” he said in Arabic, with which he knew the foreman must be thoroughly acquainted.

“ Yes, sir, I had been here ten years before that.”

“ I am very anxious to learn whether any white man who had survived the battle of El Obeid ever reached this town before its capture.”

The man thought for some time. “ Yes,” he said, “ a white man certainly came here towards the end of the siege.

I know, because I happened to meet him when I was going home from work, and he asked me the way to the governor’s.

I should not have known him to be a white man, for he had