The soldier who brought in two rifles accounts for it by saying he started with his companion to come; that his companion got frightened and dreaded to delay, so they sat down and his companion went to sleep; so my friend thought it was time to be off, and that it was as well to take his comrade’s rifle with him!!
September 17.—I have the strongest suspicion that these tales of troops at Dongola and Merowé are all gas-works, and that if you wanted to find Her Majesty’s forces you would have to go to Shepheard’s Hotel at Cairo.[49]
The reports of the advance which we get from Seyd Osman are never supported by any written evidence from Dongola, and I expect they are invented. Whether the resurrection of Stewart, Power, and Herbin will have any effect remains to be seen, but, ill-natured or not, it is my firm impression that Her Majesty’s Government will be most disagreeably surprised by their emerging.
If Stewart gets down, he ought to be in communication with Europe on the 22nd of September, and Power’s telegrams ought to be in Times 23rd September. It makes me laugh to think of the flutter in the dovecot which will follow. “That beastly Soudan again!” (Africa has indeed been a “beast” to our country, as one of Dickens’s characters called it.)
Egerton’s telegram,[50] carefully written in cypher (and equally carefully without date, but which we ascribe to June), respecting the contracts to be entered into with the Bedouin tribes to escort us down (“and be sure to look after yourself”!) might have been as well written in Arabic, it would have produced hilarity with the Mahdi. Two escaped soldiers came in with little news, they came with their arms.
A man came in from visiting the Sheikh el Obeyed. He says that the Arabs lost very few in their attack on Mahomet Ali Pasha; that they will wait till the river falls ere they try and close in on Kartoum.
The righteous indignation, expressed on the publication of that slave circular, which did nothing more than say “that the treaty of 1877 (declaring that the slaves would not be allowed to be sold after 1887) would not be put in force,” is rather amusing to think over (a pact with the devil, as, I dare say, some called it), when one thinks that the probability is the whole country will be a nest of slave hunters and banditti.
They say the Mahdi means to take up his quarters on the left bank of the Nile, so as to have his retreat clear to Kordofan in case of accidents.
The Towfikia steamer went up the Blue Nile, and found the Arabs near Giraffe, with three guns, which fired five or six rounds at the steamer, but did no harm.
The pomp of Egerton’s telegram, informing me “that Her Majesty’s Government would (really!) pay on delivery so much a head for all refugees delivered on Egyptian frontier, and would (positively, it is incredible!) reward tribes with whom I might contract with, to escort them down.”