Lake Victoria to Khartoum 



camel-back, to visit the scene of the great battle 

 under the Kerreri Hills, some six miles out of 

 Omdurman. This was rendered all the more 

 interesting by the fact that Mr. Winston 

 Churchill personally conducted the trip ; and as he 

 had been attached to the 21st Lancers in their 

 famous charge towards the end of the battle, the 

 whole thing was rhetorically explained, and the 

 old scene laid out before our eyes, beginning 

 with the preliminary operations of the previous 

 night (ist December, 1898), followed by next 

 morning's exciting affair of outposts round the 

 little rocky hill of Jebel Surgam, with a distant 

 view of our victorious army's entrenchments 

 down by the river, and " topped up " with a ride 

 over the actual ground where the charge took 

 place. There is a monument erected to the 

 memory of those of the brave 21st who fell in 

 that bold hand-to-hand smack at the vastly larger 

 pack of Dervishes concealed in the narrow khor. 

 Strangely enough, the nice old man who was in 

 charge of the camels we rode on this picnic had 

 been in the battle himself, one of the Khalifa's 

 right-hand men, and he told us, amongst other 

 thinofs, that he himself had been one of the 

 keenest in the hot pursuit of Slatin in his thrilling 

 escape from thirteen years' captivity in the Dervish 

 camp. Now he serves the British flag with un- 

 swerving loyalty. But the real old Sudanese are 

 just like that. They will fight like wild cats for 



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