Works of grant allen, p.219
Works of Grant Allen, page 219
‘At the Bourré Gate,’ Sir Austen answered respectfully, ‘in charge of Ali Ismail.’
At the words the General, like a wounded man, sprang from his seat astounded.
‘In charge of Ali Ismail!’ he cried, with an incredulous air. ‘Why, Colonel, you surprise me! The man’s a spy, of course, who came near on purpose, hoping to be taken, that he might communicate with Faragh. And you’ve left him in charge of one of Faragh’s own most intimate officers! Why, what could you have been thinking about? In a man less experienced and less trustworthy than yourself, I should be inclined to call this culpable negligence! Depend upon it, the fellow has a message from the Mahdi. By this time he’s arranged things comfortably with Faragh, no doubt. And the worst of it is, we don’t know whom to trust. We must go down at once and try to prevent any further mischief.’
Sir Austen clapped his hand to his head in horror.
‘Great heavens!’ he cried, with a sudden burst of enlightenment, ‘I must be mad! I never even thought of it!’
The General, never chiding him, moved down the steps with a resolute air.
‘This is bad news,’ he said quietly— ‘very bad news indeed. I’ve heard none worse through all this day of trial. I distrust Faragh, and I don’t know how many of his subordinates may be implicated with him. If we had only the enemy to deal with, we might hold out for weeks; but with traitors in the camp — starvation and treachery to cope with at once — God alone knows now what may happen next to us. And when we fall, they will treat my poor people as these wretches treated the defenceless souls in Berber.’
CHAPTER XXII.
THE BEGINNING OF THE END.
Early next morning, about three o’clock, as Linnell was dozing uneasily in his bed, on the second floor of an old Arab house not far from the Bourré Gate, a strange sound and tumult in the city awoke him suddenly. It wasn’t the mere ordinary fusillade or boom of the batteries; he could sleep through that quite carelessly now. It was something out of the common. He rose, and opened the latticed window to explore the mystery. Looking out across the flat roofs, a fierce red glare met his eyes to eastward. Something up, undoubtedly! Heavy firing was going on along the Blue Nile line, in the dead of night, in the direction of Bourré.
At the very same moment, even as he looked and wondered, an answering red glare burst up like flame towards the sky on the west, along the White Nile front, in the direction of Messalamieh. Heavy firing was going on in that quarter too. A horrible din seemed to grow upon his ears as he stood and listened. It was plain the enemy had assaulted in force — and from two sides at once. The end had come at last! The Mahdi must be making his final attempt on Khartoum!
With a tremor of awe, Linnell rose hastily and put on his Arab dress as usual. Then he took his field-glass in his hand, and stepped out upon the flat white roof of the tumbledown villa. His quarters were in one of the highest houses in the whole town, from whose top terrace he could command the entire Messalamieh district. Gazing in that direction, he saw at once, by the red glare of the fire and the white light of dawn, a number of swarthy clambering objects that swarmed and clustered over the rampart by the Messalamieh Gate. They looked like black ants, at such a dim distance, seen through the field-glass against the pale white wall of the fortifications: but Linnell knew in a second they were really naked black Soudanese soldiers, creeping one by one into the doomed city. They had filled up the ditch below with bundles of straw and palm-branch brushwood, and were escalading the wall prone on their bellies now, like so many cats or crawling insects!
At one glance he took it all in, that awful truth, in its full horror and ghastly significance. Those crouching black barbarians had almost carried the gate by this time, and in half an hour more the town would be glutted and given over to indiscriminate slaughter and rapine. Only those who have seen the black man at his worst can tell what nameless horrors that phrase encloses.
But before Linnell had time to make up his mind which way to go, or where duty most called him, another wild shout surged up simultaneously from the Bourré Gate, and another red glare burst fiercer and wilder than ever towards the pale expanse of tropical heaven.
The startled European turned his glass in the direction of the new noise, but saw no naked black bodies scaling the walls over in that quarter. The cry and din towards Bourré came all, it seemed, from well within the gate. The mad red glare that burst up anew to the sky was in the city itself. Then Linnell knew at once what had happened on that side. Faragh Pasha had betrayed them! The game was up! His creatures had basely opened the eastern gate! The Mahdi’s wild gang was already within the beleaguered city!
In that awful hour, every European heart in Khartoum was stirred by but one thought. To the palace! To the palace! To die defending Gordon!
With a throbbing bosom, the painter hurried down the stairs of that crazy old native house and rushed out into the deserted streets of the city. The gray light of dawn and the red reflected glare of burning houses illuminated together the narrow tangled alleys. The minarets of the crumbling old mosque across the way stood out in pale pink against the lurid red background. But not a soul was to be seen in the deserted lane. Though the din and tumult rose fiercer and ever fiercer from the two main assaulted points, the silence in the empty houses on either side was almost death-like. For most of the Mussulman inhabitants had quitted the town three weeks earlier, by the Mahdi’s permission, leaving few non-combatants within that doomed precinct; and the handful that remained were now cowering in their own gloomy little sunless bedchambers, waiting for the successful tide of negro savagery to burst in and massacre them like sheep in a slaughter-house.
Linnell girded up his burnous forthwith, and ran at all speed through the empty streets in the direction of the palace. As he neared that central point of the entire city, crowds of natives, Egyptian officials, black Soudanese soldiers, and terrified Arabs, were all hurrying for safety towards the Governor’s headquarters. It was a general sauve qui peut; all thought of their own skins, and few of organized resistance. Still, at the very moment when Linnell turned into the great square, a small body of Nubian troops was being drawn up in line, to make for the Bourré Gate, where the enemy was thickest. Sir Austen stood at their head, and recognised his cousin.
‘Well, it has come at last, Charlie,’ he said, with a solemn nod. ‘The black brutes are upon us in real earnest. This means massacre now, for my poor fellows are far too hungry, and too exhausted as well, to make anything like a decent resistance. We shall all be killed. Save yourself while you can. In that dress, nobody’d ever take you for a moment for a European. Slink back into the crowd, and when the Mahdi’s people break upon you, give in your submission, and accept the prophet.’
‘Never!’ Linnell cried, placing himself in line by his cousin’s side, and pulling out his revolver. ‘If we must sell our lives, we’ll sell them dearly, at any rate, in defence of Gordon.’
And, without another word, they made for the Bourré Gate in awful silence.
As they reached the actual scene of the fighting, or rather of the slaughter — for the worn-out defenders were too weary by far to strike a blow, even for dear life — a horrible sight met the Englishmen’s eyes. No words could describe that ghastly field of carnage. It was an orgy of death, a wild, savage carmagnole of blood and murder. A perfect sea of naked black-skinned African fanatics had poured through the open gate into the battered town, and was rushing resistlessly now through all its tortuous lanes and alleys. With hideous cries and bloodstained hands, they burst shrieking upon their defenceless enemies, who fled before them like sheep, or stood to be shot or sabred with Oriental meekness. Every form of weapon was there, from savage club to civilized rifle, and all were wielded alike with deadly but reckless exultation of barbarism. Linnell had never in his life seen so awful a picture of slaughter and desolation. The fanatics, as they swept forward, headed by their naked dervishes with blood-begrimed locks, shouted aloud in Arabic, or in their own guttural Central African dialects, fierce prayers to Allah for aid, and savage imprecations of divine wrath on the accursed heads of the Mahdi’s enemies. Neither man, woman, nor child was spared in that first fiery onslaught; whoever they met at close quarters they ran through with their bayonets or their long native spears; whoever they saw flying at a distance, they fired at with their rifles in wild confusion.
One fierce band of dervishes in red loin-cloths made straight along the street towards Sir Austen’s little party.
‘Kill, kill, kill!’ the black fanatic at their head shouted aloud to his followers in his deep Arabic tones, stretching his bare arms heavenwards: ‘Jehad! Jehad! The prophet promises Paradise to all who die to-day in the cause of Islam. Slay, in the name of Allah and the Prophet; slay, in the name of the Mahdi, his servant!’
As he spoke, a bullet from Sir Austen’s revolver whizzed hissing across the intervening space, and passed like lightning clean through his naked body. The red blood spurted out in a gush from the open wound; but the man pressed on regardless of the shot, for all that. By some strange chance, the bullet had missed any vital part; and the dervish, clapping his open hand to the spot for a moment, and then holding up his palm, dripping red with his own blood, before his frenzied followers, cried out once more, in still wilder accents:
‘Kill, kill, kill! and inherit heaven. See, the blood of the faithful is your standard to-day! My children, Allah has given us Khartoum for our own. Who live, shall divide the women of the infidels. Who die, shall sup to-night with the houris in Paradise!’
With one fierce shout of ‘Jehad! Jehad!’ the black wave, thus encouraged, swept resistlessly onward, each man tumbling over his neighbour in his eager haste to inherit the blessing. Their red eyes gleamed bright in the glare of the fires; their long matted curls of woolly hair blew loose about their thick bull necks in wild and horrible confusion. A mingled gleam of spears, and short swords, and firearms, and naked black thighs, seemed to dance all at once before Linnell’s vision. Huge African hands, begrimed with smoke, and spattered over with stains of blood and powder, wielded Remingtons and bayonets and savage native weapons in incongruous juxtaposition. It was all hell let loose, with incarnate devils rushing fiercely on, drunk with slaughter and mad with excitement. Sir Austen himself stood firm, like a practised soldier.
‘Fix bayonets!’ he cried, as they broke against his line. But his little band of weary and siege-worn Nubians faltered visibly before the shock of that terrible onslaught. ‘We must fall back,’ he whispered, half under his breath, to his cousin, forgetful that his men couldn’t have understood even if they heard his English; ‘but at least we can fall back in good order on the palace, with our faces to the enemy, and die with Gordon!’
At the word, Linnell waved his right hand wildly above his head, and turning to the little band of trained Nubian allies, cried out in Arabic:
‘Stand to your ground, men, and retreat like soldiers. We go to die with Gordon Pasha!’
The Nubians answered with a feeble cry of assent, and fell back a pace or two.
Then their assailants burst in upon them with a frantic yell of triumph.
‘Infidels, sink down to hell!’ the dervish shouted at their head in a voice of thunder; and leaping into the air, fell himself as he spoke, riddled through the body by a second bullet from Sir Austen’s six-shooter. His followers paused for some seconds as they saw their captain’s blood spatter the ground: then another naked warrior, one-armed and one-eyed, with a rifle of the newest Woolwich pattern brandished madly in his hand, and a bundle of strange charms, for all clothing, hung loose round his neck, sprang forward with a bound and took the fallen leader’s place in quick succession. Waving the broken stump of his left arm excitedly round his head, he cheered on his horde, drunk with haschisch and fanaticism, to attack the infidels and inherit Paradise!
Step by step and corner by corner, Sir Austen and his little body of faithful adherents fought their way back, retreating all the time, but with faces to the foe, through the narrow alleys and covered bazaar, in the direction of the palace. As they went, their number grew ever smaller and smaller; one weary Nubian after another fell dying on the ground, and the Mahdi’s men rushed fiercely with bare feet over his prostrate body. Now and again, a stray shot was fired at the assailants by an unseen friend on some neighbouring house-top; but, on the other hand, as the defenders retreated slowly and in good order before the overwhelming force of the foe, their enemy grew each moment more numerous and more audacious. Black warriors swarmed down the narrow lanes from every side like ants from an ant-hill. Religious frenzy and the thirst for blood had driven the dervishes mad with frantic excitement. Their thick lips showed blue with congested blood; their eyes started from their sockets; great drops of sweat poured down their naked breasts and limbs; even those that dropped, stabbed through with bayonet thrusts, and those that flung themselves in their frenzy on the serried line of the retreating defenders, cried aloud to Allah with foaming mouths as they fell to revenge his Prophet, and the Mahdi, his servant, on the cursed dogs of infidels who had sent them to Paradise before their time.
It was hot work. Linnell’s brain reeled with it. Their faces ever to the foe, and their bayonets fixed, the little band fell back, a step at a time, disputing every inch of that narrow pathway. At last they reached the great square of the town, where already other hordes of the frenzied fanatics were engaged in a ghastly and indiscriminate slaughter of all whom they came across. In the far corner, by the wall, a little band of terrified Greek women, the wives of merchants who had refused to flee before communications were cut off, crouched all huddled together near the Etat Major buildings, where some faithful black troops were endeavouring in vain to guard and protect them. Even as Linnell looked, the Mahdi’s men burst in upon the poor creatures with a headlong rush, and swept away the soldiers with their deadly onslaught. One unhappy girl they actually hacked to pieces before his very eyes, tossing her head in derision as soon as they had finished on to the flat roof of a neighbouring whitewashed building. The rest they drove before them with their spears into the further corner, where a fierce band of dervishes with grinning white teeth was already beginning to collect a living booty of women; while a second horde of marauders, turning fresh upon Sir Austen’s own tiny company of worn and wearied negroes, rushed fiercely upon them with a loud cry of ‘Mashallah; death to the infidel!’
Sir Austen gave the word to his men, in his scanty Arabic:
‘To the palace! To the palace! Quick march! Keep order! There’s nothing to fight for now,’ he added in English to his cousin, ‘but to save Gordon from unnecessary torture.’
CHAPTER XXIII.
THE FALL OF KHARTOUM.
It was no longer possible to keep up any semblance, even, of a regular line. The scanty body of famished and wearied survivors fell back in a hasty and broken rout towards the steps of the palace. The Mahdi’s men, following them up at a run, like a troop of hungry wolves upon a defenceless sheepfold, shouted louder than ever, and fell in murderous little groups, with discordant cries of triumph, on every man who stumbled or lagged behind in the scurry.
The confusion was horrible. Linnell’s brain whirled with it. Fresh swarms seemed now to break in upon the square by every lane and street and alley, like kites that swoop down from all sides upon some wounded jackal. One seething, surging mass of black savage humanity occupied the square with shrieks and imprecations. Some hung like bees on the flat roofs of the houses around, and kept up a desultory fire from their rifles on the stragglers below; others pressed on with Mohammedan ardour towards the palace itself, where a small band of famished defenders still held out at bay round the sacred person of their revered Governor.
As Linnell and his cousin reached the steps, a little line of faithful blacks formed an alley down the terrace, and a tall, spare figure clad in white European uniform stood forth, to grasp Sir Austen’s hand in solemn silence.
For a moment nobody spoke a word. All speech was useless. Then the Governor looked around him with a pathetic look of infinite pity.
‘My poor, poor children!’ he cried, gazing sadly on that wild orgy of fire and slaughter. ‘I came to save them from the stick, the lash, and the prison. I did my best to protect them. But it was ordained otherwise. I have lived whole years in this last long fortnight. Not for ourselves, Sir Austen — not for ourselves, indeed — but for them I feel it.’ Then after a short pause he added slowly: ‘And what a disappointment, too — when they come up — for Stewart and Wolseley!’
Even in that final moment of defeat and death, the hero’s first thought was for the feelings of others.
Linnell stepped forward and grasped the Governor’s hand in turn.
‘We will all die with you,’ he cried with profound emotion. It was easy enough, indeed, for him. He had nothing left on earth to live for.
And yet — and yet, now that death stood staring him in the face, he would have given worlds that moment for one last word with Psyche.
‘We’ll meet them here, Pasha, I suppose?’ Sir Austen said, trying to rally his few remaining men on the steps. ‘You will die at your post, as a soldier ought to do.’
