We must now change the scene to the Soudan—Beled-es-Soudan, or 'The Land of the Blacks,' so called by ancient geographers—whither a single flight of imagination will take us without undergoing a fortnight's voyage by sea to Alexandria, viâ the Bay of Biscay, with its long, heavy swells, and the Mediterranean, which is not always like a mill pond; and then a long and toilsome route across the Lower and Upper Provinces to where the Sheikh Moussa Abu Hagil was journeying towards his remote home, with the luckless Malcolm Skene in his train—a place on the borders of the Nubian Desert, not far from the Nile, in the neighbourhood of the third cataract, and situated about midway between Assouan, the name of which had not, as yet, become a 'household word' with us, and Khartoum, where then the well-nigh despairing Gordon was still waging his desperate defence against the Mahdi.
By this time how weary had the eye—yea, the very soul—of the luckless captive become of the desert scenery, in a land visited only by a few bold travellers, who in times past had accompanied the caravans from one valley to another. There the desert sand is deep and loose, with sharp flinty stones, in some places sprinkled with glistening rock salt, and showing here and there a grove of dwindled acacias or tufts of colocynth and senna, to relieve the awful dreariness of its aspect.
The water in the pools, even in the rainy season, is there black and putrid; hence the Arabs of the district remove with their flocks to better regions, where the higher mountains run from Assouan to Haimaur.
Steering, as it were, unerringly by landmarks known to themselves alone, the Sheikh Moussa Abu Hazil and his followers made progress towards his home—or zereba—in the quarter we have mentioned.
Malcolm Skene had now been conveyed so far inland by his captors that escape seemed hopeless; yet, buoyed up by the secret chance that such might come, he struggled on with the party day by day, ignorant of the fate that awaited him, though he could never forget that of Palmer and his companions on the shore of the Red Sea.
More than once Hassan Abdullah mockingly held before him the pocket compass, which, of course, he had contrived to abstract on some occasion. Its loss did not matter much now, but it was eventually appropriated by the Sheikh Moussa, whether it were efrit or not; and Hassan, who seemed inclined to resent this, received in reward a blow from their leader's lance.
The latter, who, in some respects, was not unlike the published portraits of his kinsman Zebehr, was at the head of a body of Bedouins, not Soudanese. Each tribe of these wild horsemen is considered to have an exclusive property in a district proportioned to the strength and importance of the tribes, but affording room for migration, which is indispensable among a people whose subsistence is derived from cattle, and the spontaneous produce of the sterile regions they inhabit. Thus they often join neighbouring tribes, Emirs and Sheikhs, in the hope of an advantageous change. In this manner were this Bedouin troop under the banner of Sheikh Moussa.
All were thin and hardy men, with the muscles of their limbs more strongly developed than the rest of the body; their strength and activity were great, and their power of abstinence such that, like their own camels, they could travel four or five days without tasting water. Their deep black eyes glared with an intensity never seen in Northern regions, and gave full credence to the marvellous stories Skene had heard of their extraordinary powers of discriminating vision and the acuteness of their other senses.
Unlike the nearly nude warriors of the Mahdi, these Bedouins under their floating burnous wore shirts of coarse cotton with wide and loose sleeves—a garment rarely changed or washed. Over this some had a Turkish gown of mingled cotton and silk, but most of them wore a mantle, called an abba, like a square, loose sack, with slits for the arms, woven of woollen thread and camel's hair, girt by a girdle, and showing broad stripes of many colours; but trousers of all kinds seemed superfluities unknown. Picturesque looking fellows they were, and reminded Skene of the descriptive lines in Grant's 'Arabia':
'Freedom's fierce unconquered child,
The Bedouin robber, nursling of the wild,
With whirlwind speed he guides his vagrant band,
Fire-eyed and tawny as their subject sand:
On foam-flecked steeds, impetuous all advance,
Whirl the bright sabre, couch the quivering lance,
Or grasping, ruthless, in the savage chase,
The belt-slung carbine and spike-headed mace,
Ardent for plunder, emulate the wind,
Scorn the low level, spurn the world behind;
While the dense dust-cloud rears its giant form,
And, rolled in spires, revealed the threatening storm.'
Malcolm Skene found that he was rather a favourite with these wild fellows from the facility with which he could converse with them in Arabic; and though he knew not the thousand names that language is said to possess for a sword, he could repeat to them the Fatihat, or short opening chapter of the Koran, called that of prayer and thanksgiving; and they accorded him great praise accordingly. And, sooth to say, any Christian may repeat it without evil, as it simply runs thus in English:
'Praise be to God, the Lord of all creatures; the Most Merciful; the King of the Day of Judgment! Thee do we worship, and of Thee do we beg assistance. Direct us in the right way of those to whom Thou hast been gracious; not of those against whom Thou art incensed, nor of those who go astray.'
But he knew the hostility of the slimy and savage Greek, Pietro Girolamo, and of the cowardly and false Egyptian, Hassan Abdullah, was undying towards him, and that they only waited for the opportunity to take his life, if possible unknown to the Sheikh, and then achieve their own escape from the latter.
On every occasion that suited they reviled him, spat on him, and hurled pebbles at him; but if their hands wandered instinctively to pistol or poniard he had but to utter the magic words to the Sheikh Moussa, 'Ana dakheilak!' (I am your protected), and the lowering of the lance-head in threat sufficed to send them cowed to the rear.
Moussa now made Skene acquainted with a fact which, though explanatory as to the reason why his life was spared, did not prove very soothing or hopeful; that he meant to retain him at his zereba as a hostage for his kinsman Zebehr Pasha, 'then under detention at Cairo by those sons of dogs the English—Allah bou rou Gehenna!'
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.