Meantime Ishmael, returning no more to El Azhar, had settled himself on an island far up the river, and there practising extreme austerities, he gathered a great reputation for holiness, and attracted attention throughout the valley of the Nile by breathing out threatening and slaughter, not so much against the leaders of his own people who were degrading Islam as against the Christians, under whose hated bondage, as he believed, the whole Mohammedan world was going mad.
So wide was the appeal of Ishmael's impeachment and so vast became his following that the Government (now Anglo-Egyptian), always sure that, after sand-storms and sand-flies, holy men of all sorts were the most pernicious products of the Soudan, thought it necessary to put him down, and for this purpose they sent two companies of Arab camel police, promising a reward to the one that should capture the new prophet.
The two camel corps set out on different tracks, but each resolving to take Ishmael by night, they entered his village at the same time from opposite ends, met in the darkness, and fought and destroyed one another, so that when morning dawned they saw their leaders on both sides lying dead in the crimsoning light.
The gruesome incident had the effect of the supernatural on the Arab intellect, and when Ishmael and his followers, with nothing but a stick in one hand and the Koran in the other, came down with a roar of voices and the sand whirling in the wind, the native remnant turned tail and fled before the young prophet's face.
Then the Governor-General, an agnostic with a contempt for "mystic senses" of all kinds, sent a ruckling, swearing, unbelieving company of British infantry, and they took Ishmael without further trouble, brought him up to Khartoum, put him on trial for plotting against the Christian Governor of his province, and imprisoned him in a compound outside the town.
But soon the Government began to see that though they had crushed Ishmael they could not crush Ishmaelism, and they lent an ear to certain of the leaders of his own faith, judges of the Mohammedan law courts, who, having put their heads together, had devised a scheme to wean him from his asceticism, and so destroy the movement by destroying the man. The scheme was an old one, the vales of a woman, and they knew the very woman for the purpose.
This was a girl named Adila, a Copt, only twenty years of age, and by no means a voluptuous creature, but a little winsome thing, very sweet and feminine, always freshly clad, and walking barefoot on the hot sand with an erect confidence that was beautiful to see.
Adila had been the daughter of a Christian merchant at Assouan, and there, six years before, she had been kidnapped by a Bisharin tribe, who, answering her tears with rough comfort, promised to make her a queen.
In their own way they did so, for those being the dark days of Mahdism, they brought her to Omdurman and put her up to auction in the open slave-market, where the black eunuch of the Caliph, after thrusting his yellow fingers into her mouth to examine her teeth, bought her, among other girls, for his master's harem.
There, with forty women of varying ages, gathered by concupiscence from all quarters of the Soudan, she was mewed up in the close atmosphere of two sealed chambers in the Caliph's crudely gorgeous palace, seeing no more of her owner than his coffee-coloured countenance as he passed once a day through the curtained rooms and signalled to one or other of their bedecked and be-ringleted occupants to follow him down a hidden stairway to his private quarters. At such moments of inspection Adila would sit trembling and breathless, in dread of being seen, and she found her companions only too happy to help her to hide herself from the attentions they were seeking for themselves.