“Approach, my son,” said the Khalifa to Macnamara suddenly. Macnamara came near. He understood Arabic better than he had admitted, and he saw in this three months’ respite, if it were granted, the chance to carry out a plan that was in his mind. The Khalifa held out a hand to him, and Macnamara, boiling with rage inwardly and his face flushing—which the Khalifa mistook for modesty—kissed it.
“You shall have two moons to learn Arabic of a good teacher every day, and then for one moon I myself will instruct you in the truth,” said Abdullah. “You shall wait at my door and walk by my stirrup and teach my horse as you have taught the English horse of Osman Wad Adam. Thy faithful service I will reward, and thy unfaithfulness I will punish with torture and death.”
“I’ll cut the price of the kiss on those dirty fingers from a dervish joint,” muttered Macnamara to himself, as he took his place that evening at the Khalifa’s door.
One thing Macnamara was determined on. He would never pray in a Mahommedan mosque, he would never turn Mahommedan even for a day. The time had come when he must make a break for liberty. He must have money. With money Mahommed Nafar, who was now his teacher—Slatin had managed that—would move for him.
Under the spur of his purpose Macnamara rapidly acquired Arabic, and steadfastly tried to make Mahommed Nafar his friend, for he liked the little man, and this same little man was the only Arab, save one, from first to last, whom he would not have spitted on a bayonet. At first he chafed under the hourly duplicity necessary in his service to the Khalifa, then he took an interest in it, and at last he wept tears of joy over his dangerous proficiency. Day after day Macnamara waited, in the hope of making sure that the Khalifa’s treasure was under the room where he slept. Upon the chance of a successful haul, he had made fervid promises, after the fashion of his race, to the shoemaker Mahommed Nafar. At first the shoemaker would have nothing to do with it: helping prisoners to escape meant torture and decapitation; but then he hated the Khalifa, whose Baggaras had seized his property, and killed his wife and children; and in the end Macnamara prevailed. Mahommed Nafar found some friendly natives from the hills of Gilif, who hated the Khalifa and his tyrannous governments, and at last they agreed to attempt the escape.
III
A month went by. Lust, robbery, and murder ruled in Omdurman. The river thickened with its pollution, the trees within the walls sickened of its poison, the bones of the unburied dead lay in the moat beyond the gates, and, on the other side of the river, desolate Khartoum crumbled over the streets and paths and gardens where Gordon had walked. The city was a pit of infamy, where struggled, or wallowed, or died to the bellowing of the Khalifa’s drum and the hideous mirth of his Baggaras, the victims of Abdullah. But out in the desert—the Bayuda desert—between Omdurman and Old Dongola, there was only peace. Here and there was “a valley of dry bones,” but the sand had washed the bones clean, the vultures had had their hour and flown away, the debris of deserted villages had been covered by desert storms, and the clear blue sky and ardent sun were over all, joyous and immaculate. Out in the desert there was only the life-giving air, the opal sands, the plaintive evening sky, the eager morning breeze, the desolated villages, and now and then in the vast expanse, stretching hundreds and hundreds of miles south, an oasis as a gem set in a cloth of faded gold.
It would have seemed to any natural man better to die in the desert than to live in Omdurman. So thought a fugitive who fled day and night through the Bayuda desert, into the sandy wastes, beyond whose utmost limits lay Wady Halfa, where the English were.
Macnamara had conquered. He had watched his chance when two of the black guard were asleep, and the Khalifa was in a stupor of opium in the harem, had looted Abdullah’s treasure, and carried the price of the camels and the pay of the guides to Mahommed Nafar the shoemaker.
His great sprawling camel, the best that Mahommed Nafar could buy of Ebn Haraf, the sheikh in the Gilif Hills, swung down the wind with a long, reaching stride, to the point where the sheikh would meet him, and send him on his way with a guide. If he reached the rendezvous safely, there was a fair chance of final escape.