“I have received your letter enclosing that of my sister written four years ago, and the note from Wingate. Before everything else, let me thank you for the endeavours you are to make to assist me. Your letter was delayed in reaching me owing to the imprisonment of the guide, followed by the watch kept upon us after Slatin’s escape, and my transfer to the Saier, from which I hope to be released soon. There is great need of coins here; up to the present, no one has been able to produce a silver-resembling dollar. If I could produce such a coin, it would lead to my release from prison, and lend probability to my chances of escape. Could you send me instructions for the simple mixing of any soft metals to produce a silvery appearance, and send me some ingredients? I should like also an instrument to imitate the milling of coins; the dies can be cut here. I should be glad of any tools or instruments which you think cannot be had here. If I am not released by the time these arrive, I feel sure that I shall be released through their agency. Please send the enclosed notes to their respective destinations, and when the answers arrive, send them |224| on with the things I ask for. Can you give me any news as to how my business is progressing at Assouan, and the transactions of my manager? Our common friends here are in a sad way. Slatin will have told you all about the forced circumcisions; and now all the Christians have been ordered to marry three or four wives, and are engaged with marriage ceremonies. Beppo and I are in prison together in chains; other prisoners are Ibrahim Fauzi, Ibrahim Hamza, of Berber, who was arrested after Slatin’s escape; Ahmed and Bekheit Egail; Sadik and Besher have been transported to Equatoria, with two of their relations. Your messenger brought with him seventy dollars, which have been given to Beppo, and I enclose his receipt for them. Kindly translate the letter I enclose for Wingate; I have written it in German, as no one here but me understands the language. Please keep these letters secret. For God’s sake, do not let the newspaper people get hold of them, as you know, if they did, it would cost me my head. Perhaps, if you could get them to give as news something like this, it would help me: ‘We hear that, after the escape of Slatin, Neufeld was secured against escape; he has rendered great services to Mahdieh with the saltpetre; he would be able to replace Osta Abdallah, who is now old and feeble; Neufeld is in the greatest distress, and in prison with his certain death close at hand; the people in the Soudan believe he is a relation of Slatin.’”
Onoor Issa went off with my replies, undertaking to return in a few months, after having made arrangements between Berber and Cairo for my escape; and during his absence I was to scheme for any excuse to get out of prison; escape from there was impossible. Onoor—or the translators of his accounts—are mistaken in saying that he actually met me in prison; all negotiations were carried on through the Abyssinian woman whom he employed to come into the prison for “medical attendance,” or Umm es Shole, and days and days elapsed between the visits sometimes, in all amounting to maybe two months. There were times |225| of mental tension in the Saier of Omdurman. To me ill luck and good luck appeared to be ever striving for the ascendency during my long captivity. Good luck gained in the end—the same good luck which had accompanied the Sirdar throughout his daring campaign to conquer, not only Abdullah, but the Soudan, and which, God grant, may ever accompany him in future campaigns; but the cup-and-ball-catch-and-miss strain was to me terrible. My one prayer was that an end might come. Liberty, of course, I hoped for to the end; but I often discovered myself speculating as to whether it was true or not that those suddenly decapitated by a single blow experienced some seconds of really intellectual consciousness, and wondering to myself whether, when my head was rolled into the dust by the Khaleefa’s executioner, there would be time to give one last look of defiance.
Yet when I come to think of it, there was nothing very strange in such contemplations. What soldier or sailor has not often in his quiet moments tried to picture his own death, defiant to the last as he goes down before a more powerful enemy? And, after all, thousands and thousands of men and women in civilized countries are enduring a worse captivity and imprisonment than many did in the Soudan; but they are unfortunate in this—that no one has thrown a halo of romance over their sufferings. My lot was a hard, very hard one, I must admit; but the lot of some other captives was such that thousands in Europe would have been pleased to exchange theirs for it, and would have gained in the exchange.
CHAPTER XIX RUMOURS OF RELIEF
Soon after the departure of Onoor Issa I was saved any further trouble in the way of scheming for excuses to get out of the Saier. Awwad-el-Mardi, the successor of Nur-el-Gerafawi as the Amin Beit-el-Mal on the appointment of the latter as director of the Khaleefa’s ordnance stores, had been approached by Nahoum Abbajee and others on the subject of the extraction of gold and silver from certain stones which had been discovered in the neighbourhood. Awwad sent Nahoum to see me about the erection of a crushing-mill or furnaces. My interview with Nahoum was a stormy one. It commenced by his upbraiding me for the pranks I had played in smashing the arsenal punching-machine when we were associated in the establishment of a mint. The more I laughed the angrier Nahoum became; he is deaf, and like most deaf people, invariably speaks in an undertone, which is as distressing to the hearer as is the necessity he is under of bawling back his replies. It is next to impossible to hold a conversation with a deaf person without the natural result of raising the voice exhibiting itself in the features; the annoyance is there plain |227| enough, but when the face flushes with the unwonted exertion, your deaf friend thinks you are getting angry, and follows suit. This is precisely what Abbajee did. He showed me his specimens, and I bawled into his ear, “Mica—not gold, not silver—mica;” and he yelled back, “Gold, silver, gold.” The noisy discussion, accompanied as it was with gesticulations, attracted other prisoners around us, and Nahoum went off in high dudgeon.
ONOOR ISSA.
When he had gone, a few of my friends asked why I did not offer to assist him, and even if the thing was a failure, they thought I was clever enough to find something else to do; but, as they said, “promise anything provided it gets you out of the Saier.” There were excellent reasons, but which I might not confide to them, why any work I undertook to do should occupy months, and, if necessary, years in completion. To offer to assist Nahoum in extracting gold and silver from such stones meant that two or three weeks at the outside would evidence our failure to do so, and then it was Saier again for me. Whether any work I undertook to do for the Khaleefa was to end in success or failure was immaterial to me; but it was very material that the result, whatever it was to be, should not be attained for months, as by the time my guides returned, the conditions surrounding my escape might have so changed as to necessitate an entire change in plans and programme. They might even entail the guides’ return to Cairo or the frontier, and this occupied months. But the advice to accept Nahoum’s proposals and trust |228| to luck for discovering some other excuse for remaining out of the Saier when failure could no longer be concealed, appealed to me, and, in reply to my offer of assistance, a messenger came from the Khaleefa ordering the Saier to hand me over to the director of the Beit-el-Mal. His other instructions were that the bars and heavy chains were to be taken off my feet and legs, and that I was to be secured by a single pair of anklets connected with a light chain. While this change was being made I received the congratulations of the gaolers and prisoners, and (February, 1896) was escorted out of the prison by two guards to enter upon a new industry which had in it as much of the elements of success as would accompany an attempt to squeeze blood out of a cobbler’s lap-stone. I had not forgotten Shwybo’s fate.
When I reached Khartoum, Awwad-el-Mardi had not yet arrived. It was the month of Ramadan, and as all transactions were in abeyance until after sunset, I was not allowed to land until Awwad arrived to hand me over officially. I was left alone on one of Gordon’s old steamers, moored at the spot where Gordon fell, and where the victorious Sirdar and his troops landed to conduct the burial service. During the hours I had to wait gazing at the ruined town and the dismantled palace which saw the martyrdom of as good a man and soldier as ever trod this earth, I ruminated over his blasted hopes and my own. I shall not pretend to call to mind all the thoughts which surged through my brain as I paced alone over the shell-and bullet-splintered deck; but you can imagine what they |229| were when I reflected that I was the only European in the Soudan who had fired a shot for Gordon, and that I was now a captive in the hands of the successor of the Mahdi, gazing at the ruined town from which, just eleven years ago, we had hoped to rescue its noble defender. I should be ashamed to say that when Awwad did at last come I was not in tears.
I felt more acutely than I did when first taken to Khartoum to be “impressed,” and still more acutely than when I was hurriedly bundled into the old Mission to start the saltpetre works. For the first time since my captivity I had been left absolutely alone. I was sitting on one of that fleet of “penny steamers” which, had Gordon not sent down the Nile to bring up his rescuers, might have saved him and the Soudan in spite of the wicked delay resulting from the attempt to make a theatrically impressive show of an expedition intended to be one of flying succour to the beleaguered garrison and its brave commander, praying for months for the sight of one single red coat. Gordon, I had been told, towards the end, called the Europeans together in Khartoum, and telling them that, in his opinion, the Government intended to sacrifice him, recommended them to make their escape. A deliberate attempt to sacrifice him could not have succeeded better. What wonder, when such thoughts as these and many others had been affecting me for hours, that when Awwad came, as darkness was setting in, the darkness of night had settled too upon my mind. He, believing that my chains were the real cause of |230| my depression, ordered that they should be exchanged immediately for lighter and smoother ones, for the anklets and chains given me by Idris were rough in the extreme.