Hence, as yet, Malcolm knew that his life was deemed of some value to his captors, who did not then foresee the future deportation of the king of the slave dealers, by Lord Wolseley's orders, to Gibraltar.
To escape, on foot or horseback, or in any way elude the Bedouin guard, seemed to him a greater difficulty than to achieve the same thing from Soudanese, so well were the former mounted, so amply armed, so fleet and active in movement, and every way so acute, eagle-eyed, serpent-like in wile and wisdom and relentless as a tiger in fury and bloodshed.
Even if he could successfully elude them, what lay before him—what behind, the way he must pursue, if ever again he was to reach the world he had been reft from! The desert—the awful, trackless desert he had traversed in their obnoxious company, but could never hope to traverse it alone—the desert, where water is more precious to the traveller than would be the famous Emerald Mountain of Nubia itself! It barred him out from civilization as completely as if it had been the waves of a shoreless sea.
The Sheikh often rode by his side, and asked him many perplexing questions about Europe and the land of the French, of which the inquirer had not the most vague idea, or of how the red soldiers Of the mysterious Queen reached Egypt, or where they came from; of Stamboul, which he thought was in Arabia; of India, which he thought was in Russia—of who were the English, and who the British that always aided them; adding, as he stroked his great beard, that 'it mattered little, as they must all perish—Feh sebil Allah!' (for the cause of God).
He hated them with a bitterness beyond all language, as interferers with the traffic in djellabs, as the slave-dealers term their human wares; and for the losses he had sustained at their hands, like Osman Digna, when some of his dhows were captured on their voyage to Jeddah by British cruisers; and ultimately even Suakim became so closely watched by the latter that his caravan leaders had to deposit their captives by twos and threes at lonely places on the shore of the Red Sea, to transmit them across it when occasion served. Then when he came to speak of the Anglo-Egyptian slave convention, which was the ruin of the traders in human flesh, he gnashed his teeth, his black eye-balls shot fire, and he looked as if with difficulty he restrained himself from pinning Skene to the sand with his lance.
It was the ruin of the Soudan, he declared, as the Christians only wished to liberate all slaves that they might become their property. He had struggled against this, he said, with voice and sword till the summer of 1881, when the Mahdi, Mahommed Achmet Shemseddin, issuing from his cave on the White Nile, proclaimed himself the New Prophet. Then he cast his lot with the latter, and in two years after served with him at the capture of El Obeid, and the slaughter of the armies of Hicks and Baker, when they won together a holy influence and a military reputation, which were greatly enhanced by subsequent conflicts and events.
Such was the stern, unpleasant, and uncompromising individual in whose hands Malcolm Skene found himself retained as a hostage, in a trifling way it seemed, for Zebehr-Rahama-Gymme-Abel, better known as Zebehr Pasha, whilom the friend of General Gordon, but in reality the most slippery, savage, and bitter enemy of Britain in the present time.
And full of the heavy thoughts his entire circumstances forced upon him, somewhere about the first of November he found himself, with his escort, approaching a zereba which had been one of the headquarters of Zebehr, but latterly assigned to his kinsman, Sheikh Moussa, and the very aspect of it made even the stout heart of Malcolm Skene sink within him, as he had been prepared for a tented camp, or wigwam-like village, but not for the place in which he found himself, and which was one of those described by Dr. Schweinfurth, the great German traveller, when he visited Zebehr Pasha a short time before.