28 Bird Hunting on tne White Nile. 



with a small mud house, the English Officers' Club, and 

 here every evening the Soudanese may catch a glimpse of 

 the members playing tennis or racquets. One of the 

 most interesting places in Omdurman, although now in 

 ruins and difficult to find, is the " Saier," the awful 

 prison in which Charles Neufeld and so many other 

 victims of the Khalifa spent years in torture. Slatin 

 Pasha writes thus of the horrors of this place : " A 

 gate, strongly guarded day and night by armed blacks, 

 gives access to an inner court, in which several mud and 

 stone huts have been erected. During the day-time, 

 the unhappy prisoners, most of them heavily chained 

 and manacled, lie about in the shade of the buildings. 

 .... At night the wretched creatures are driven 

 like sheep into the stone huts, which are not pro- 

 vided with windows It is a painful sight to 



see scores of half-suffocated individuals pouring out of 

 these dens, bathed in perspiration, and utterly exhausted 

 by the turmoil of the long and sleepless night." 



The walls round this awful place are now broken and 

 crumbling, and only portions of the huts remain. 

 But enough can be seen to make it almost impossible 

 of belief that any of the crowd who were forced into 

 these dens could have lived through one night. That 

 many succumbed we know. Outside the huts in the 



