A few days after Ahmed's departure the whole matter went quite out of our heads, and before long I was again negotiating with another Arab to assist us to escape, for I did not wish to leave a stone unturned. If it had been a question of my flight alone, there would not have been so much difficulty. As a man I could have stained my naturally brown complexion, dressed in rags, and begged my way along the banks of the Blue Nile to Abyssinia; but I could not leave the poor sisters behind, and therefore resolved to wait patiently until a deliverer should come.
Several of the merchants who had been to Egypt told me that Archbishop Sogaro had often sent us money viâ Korosko, Halfa, and Sawakin; but the dishonest Arabs had always appropriated it for themselves. In fact, ever since 1884 our good Archbishop had never ceased in his efforts to assist us and to make our captivity more bearable. He left no stone unturned, and moved Moslems, Christians, the Government, and indeed His Holiness the Pope, on our behalf, and one of the missionaries was maintained on the Egyptian frontier with the special object of endeavouring to procure our release; they took it in turns to relieve each other, and were Fathers Dominicus Vicentini, Yohann Dichtl, Xavier Geyer, Alois Bonomi, Leon Henriot, and Alois Specke, the last of whom died at Assuan. We had many great difficulties, but perhaps the greatest was the continual bad faith of the Arabs.
The transport of letters endangered the lives not only of the bearers, but of the receivers as well, and any letter addressed to a European would, if discovered, undoubtedly end either in the intended recipient's death or imprisonment for life. But Archbishop Sogaro worked on with indefatigable earnestness. Early in 1890 he sent one of our Coptic Mission teachers, named Hanna Arraga, with money and goods to the frontier, whence, if possible, he was to proceed to Omdurman and assist us. It was thought the plan might succeed, for at that time Zogal was Emir of Dongola, and he was desirous of opening trade with Halfa. Hanna therefore sent an Arab on to find out how matters stood, while he himself remained on the frontier; but the Arab never returned.
It so happened that just at this time Zogal and the two Baggara emirs sent to watch him had a violent dispute, which resulted in all of them being recalled to Omdurman. The Khalifa decided in favour of the Baggaras, Zogal was thrown into chains, and Abdullah's nephew, Yunis, was appointed Emir of Dongola; the latter held very different views with regard to intercourse with Egypt, and that is why the Arab never returned to Halfa. About fifteen days, however, before I effected my escape, the Arab came to Omdurman and told me about the matter. His own master and son had been implicated in the Dongola dispute and had been thrown into chains; that was his reason for not returning, and after that I never saw him again.[T]
Meanwhile, Ahmed Hassan, whom I had sent to Cairo with the letter, duly delivered it to Archbishop Sogaro, who made a written agreement with him for our release; he also instructed Hanna to proceed from Halfa to Korosko, and there hand over to Ahmed Hassan the goods valued at £100. Through Archbishop Sogaro's intermediary, Ahmed Hassan was given every support by the Egyptian military authorities, who presented him with £20 and gave him a free passage to Korosko. On the 15th of September, 1891, he left that place for Omdurman with the goods.
At Omdurman the winter had come and gone, the Nile had risen to its full height and had subsided, but there was no sign of Ahmed. I was not surprised, for I had long been accustomed to disappointments of this sort. I merely remarked to myself that the number of persons who had deceived us had been increased by one, and that if a deliverer did not soon come from Egypt, there was another deliverer—death—whose approach was certain. The heavy work was sapping our waning strength, I began to spit blood, felt severe pains in my chest, and was little else than skin and bone.
The poor sisters were still nearer the grave. Our moral and physical sufferings during these ten long years of captivity had told on us terribly; death was what we most longed for and for which we patiently waited. The sad prospect of never regaining our liberty, of living a life of slavery, debarred from all the advantages and progress of the world, never again to worship in our grand churches and enjoy the comforts of our holy religion; but to live and die amongst the fiery rocks and sand of Omdurman, where the burning sun turned dead bodies into mummies—to die and be buried in slavery—the prospect of living was indeed unattractive, and what wonder we should long for death to free us from such misery!
After all these sufferings it was indeed hard to see our will-o'-the-wisp-like hope, which we had pursued so often, dissolve into nothing, and to find ourselves once more the victims of a fraud and deception. How fortunate we thought those who had been killed in battle, or had died of starvation or disease! We even envied the lot of those who had been massacred in Khartum. After all, the anguish of death had been but momentary, and now all suffering and pain was over, while we seemed to have passed through a hundred deaths, we had been in his clutches over and over again; hunger, thirst, and disease had all, at one time or another, almost claimed us as their victims. We had witnessed the destruction of cities, the annihilation of armies, the slaughter of thousands, and the ruthless massacre and bloodshed of innocent people; man's dignity trodden under foot, and human life valued far below that of a sheep or a goat. And after all this we must live and die forgotten and unknown, our lasting resting-place a strange land, and our bodies in all likelihood food for hyenas. Thus we longed for death to remove us from these scenes of perpetual cruelty and oppression. Our nerves had become so strained that the slightest knock at the door would make us start; the sound of the great onbeïa made us positively tremble. Almost half the total number of Europeans, Greeks, Syrians, and Jews were dead, and all we hoped for was that we should soon follow them.
The death of one of our sisters only increased in me the desire to die as well. On the 4th of October, 1891, Sister Concetta Corsi, who was in a very weak state of health, was suddenly carried off by typhus. According to the Sudan custom, we wound her body in a cloth, tied it up in a mat (for there were no coffins to be had), and carried her, almost immediately after death, to a spot some six miles north of the town—the direction in which her eyes in lifetime had been so often turned. All the Greeks and Syrians followed, and there in the stillness of the desert we laid her in the warm sand, protecting her body from the ravenous hyenas by a few thorns. A short prayer was offered up for her and for the souls of those who had gone before; then we turned sadly back, hoping that before long we too might be lying beside her.
But I felt that my life was in God's hands, and comforted myself with the belief that God was dealing with me as He thought best, and that I must submit to His Divine will. My hut was gloomy in the extreme; for several days I did not speak to any one, and when night came I threw myself down on my angarib, but sleep would not come to me; then I would gaze up into the great vault of heaven and think that this same sky was over my fatherland, from which I was an exile, surrounded by suffering and sickness.