In the Mahdi's Grasp

by George Manville Fenn

The prisoners were all fine-looking young men, fierce and savage of aspect, and doubtless accustomed to deal out slaughter, torture, and horrible cruelties amongst the conquered people of the Soudan; but to Frank as he sat there the idea of their being slain before his eyes in cold blood half maddened him, filling him with an intense desire to be one of a retributive army whose task it would be to sweep their conquerors from the land and back into the wild districts from which they had flocked in response to the hoisting of the Mahdi’s standard of war with its promise of blood, treasure, and slaves.

“They are savages—savages,” he muttered. “Why do such wretches cumber the earth?”

At that moment he felt the young Emir’s hand upon his arm, and he started as if from some horrible nightmare to see the young man’s smiling face before him, and followed the direction of his pointing hand.

For the horrible scene which he had been brought to see as a pleasant sight, was the execution of some of the men who had risen against the Emir and his friend.

It was a scene that, but for its truth and that it was but one of the many horrors of its kind which stained the domination of the Khalifa and his people, were better left unpenned—one of those which show the need for retributive justice and the strong hand of a power whose strength should at once crush down the vile rule of cruelty and crime against modern civilisation and peace.

For as Frank’s eyes followed the pointing hand it was to see that the wholesale murder of the prisoners had begun, and that the preparations he had supposed to be scaffolding for some fresh buildings were but part of the horror he was to witness. Already ropes had been fastened round the necks of three of the miserable prisoners, who were drawn up hanging from a crossbeam; and as the crowds shouted in their triumph more and more were drawn up, till quite twenty were suspended, quivering for a brief time and then swinging slowly, becoming motionless and dead.

Fascinated and helpless, Frank gazed, till a loud shouting drew his eyes to another group nearer to him, and there, bound and kneeling, with a spear-armed man in front and a dozen more behind, were some thirty of those who were never to look again upon the glory of the fast-sinking sun.

But there was no struggling—no sign of resistance. The prisoners knelt bare-headed, their faces proud and calm, and for the most part silent, save where here and there one turned smiling to his companion to right or left, as if to say a few words of encouragement, though for the most part they gazed straight before them at their guards, and in imagination it seemed to the young Englishman that they were bidding their enemies see how brave men dared to die.

It was the hideous rule of the Mahdi and the sword, for as Frank looked, one who seemed to be an officer, in flowing white garments, rode forward from the young man’s left, and, checking his horse close by the kneeling line, shouted an order.

In an instant the swords of the men behind the prisoners gleamed in the afternoon sunshine, they drew back the white sleeves from their dark arms, and one by one, and in nearly every case at a single blow, following what seemed like a lightning flash, head after head dropped upon the sand, and the quivering bodies fell forward amidst the triumphant shouts of the crowds around.