It would take too long to follow this miserable but innocent convict through the weary years he spent working out his awful doom. To be able to realize what an Egyptian convict's life is like one must at least have seen the prisons and the hulk. The first five years were spent in the prison at Tourah. The very fact that this man—so strong willed and passionate by nature—was innocent drove him to the verge of frenzy, and having become known as a dangerous and violent convict he found himself confined first in a solitary cell, and then drafted to the prison at Tokar. Here he was compelled to associate with the very worst criminals in Egypt; and, breaking the rules again, he was sentenced to undergo the remainder of his imprisonment on board the hulk in Trinkitat Bay.
It is enough to say that this bay is on the Red Sea littoral, a terrible place for any living man, white or black, to have to spend his life. It was in this hulk that the writer saw Mahkmoud. Escape from this floating jail is practically impossible. It is moored some seven hundred yards from the shore, and the water teems with sharks, who do not allow much to escape their observant eyes as they continually cruise round the hulk.
Many times poor wretches doomed to this living grave have escaped from Tokar Prison. It is easy, for the prison is only built of mud and wattle, and the warders are very careless. But up to the time I shall describe later no prisoner had been known to get far away.
Nomad tribes of Somalis and Arabs (the "Fuzzy-Wuzzies" of the days of our fierce fights at El Teb and Tamai, Tokar and McNeill's Zareba) live and move all round this part of the bush, occupying the few wells there are, right up to the Erkoweit hills. The Government give the head-men of these tribes substantial rewards for each fugitive they capture and bring in, so that the convict's chance of escape is infinitesimal. They must go to these tribes for food and water, or die of hunger and thirst in the desert.
The Nile is the very life and soul of the Egyptian fellah, and the captives of the Kings of Assyria, who sat down by the waters of Babylon and wept, could not have longed more passionately for their Jewish homes than did these poor outcasts to see once more their native villages and taste "the sweet waters of the Nile."
"If I can but escape and reach those distant hills," they told themselves, "then I can easily walk over them. There may still be a few miles of desert sand to cross, but it will surely at length bring me once again to the great beloved river, our Father Nile." This remark has been made to the writer times without number when visiting the convict gangs at work in the course of his official duties. But one and all of the hapless wretches reckoned without the far-stretching, arid sands or the prowling nomads, ever on the watch for fugitives.
One hot, still, starlight night, towards the end of the seventh year of his penal servitude, whilst the sentry was snugly rolled up in his blanket, Mahkmoud slipped overboard from the hulk and swam shorewards. He had seen the sharks cruising slowly round the hulk for many a long day, but, as he said in after years when telling the story of his escape, "Better become food for sharks than endure a living death." As luck would have it, he reached the beach safely, and after wandering towards the distant hills all that day and night he was overcome with hunger and thirst and, resigning himself to his fate, lay down under the sparse shadow of a thorn-bush to die. But Providence decreed otherwise. He was found by a party of raiding Baggara horsemen, who carried him off to Adharama, the head-quarters of the celebrated Dervish Emir, Osman Digna.
For the next two years Mahkmoud was a household slave in Osman Digna's house. While he was there the Khalifa sent for his Governor of the Eastern Sudan, and Mahkmoud accompanied his master. So once more, after nine long years, he again set eyes on the River Nile.
Even now it was almost impossible to escape, for the wild Arab tribes who at this time held sway over the country from Sarras to Fashoda loathed and despised the Egyptian fellah, and no one would help him. After three more years of bondage, however, spent between the Eastern Sudan and Omdurman, Mahkmoud escaped, joined a caravan which was bringing gum and ostrich feathers to the Egyptian frontier, and at last found himself on the Egyptian Nile at Assouan.