He lay wide awake, wondering if this was the great attack on Khartoum that the Mahdi had always planned.
A few hours later, three black soldiers entered the prison bearing something in a bloody cloth. They threw it at the prisoner's feet, and he saw that it was the head of General Gordon.
When the relieving army reached Khartoum, they found the Mahdi's banners of black and green flaunting from its walls, and the guns that had so bravely defended it turned against them. They had come too late.
A traitor in the camp had hastened the end, and Gordon had fallen, hacked to pieces, while trying to rally his troops.
For hours after he fell, massacre and destruction went on in the city.
Fourteen years later, Lord Kitchener and his soldiers avenged that massacre, and marched into Khartoum.
The Mahdi was dead. He who boasted that he was immortal had died from poison given him by a woman whom he had cruelly used. The Mahdi's successors had fallen before a conquering English army.
When the Mahdists sacked and burned the Governor's Palace, they forgot to destroy the trees and the rose bushes that Gordon with his own hands had planted.
And in a new and lovely garden, beside a new Palace from which a brave Scottish soldier rules the Soudan, the roses grow still, fragrant and beautiful.
Khartoum is a great town now, peaceful and prosperous.