A Sportsman at Large 233 



experience ! One day, after the air had cleared, I was angling 

 for Nile fish from the deck of the Cleopatra, when suddenly I 

 was seized with the most agonizing pains I have ever suffered. 

 I rushed below and collapsed. The faithful Ted saw that 

 I was in desperate straits. Leaving me in the tender and sym- 

 pathetic care of my C.O., her mother and Abu Zed, he dis- 

 embarked, commandeered a camel, cut across the desert to 

 Girgeh, and telegraphed to Doctor Keatinge (the celebrated 

 physician of Cairo) to come up post-haste to my succour. 

 My guardian angels were unremitting in their attention, and 

 Heaven be praised ! by the time the doctor arrived the worst 

 of the trouble had passed, though I was left in a very weak 

 and shaken condition. 



We drifted back to Girgeh in order to take a train for the 

 capital. 



Here we ran across an R.A. officer, named Captain Machell, 

 whom I knew, and who had with him no less a personage than 

 Slatin Pasha, who had just escaped from the clutches of the 

 Mahdi at Omdurman ; where he had been kept in durance 

 vile for many weary years, sometimes half starved, sometimes 

 in chains for weeks together ; at others almost beaten to 

 death, and finally being forced to act as " syce " to run 

 before his oppressor's chariot. 



At last, the strenuous efforts made for Slatin' s rescue suc- 

 ceeded, with the result as stated that we hit him off on his 

 journey back to Cairo. He was garbed in an ancient jibbeh, 

 with a faded tarboosh, bereft of tassel, on his head, and lint 

 slippers on his feet a pitiful figure indeed, as compared with 

 the resplendent Rudolph Slatin, who had been Governor of 

 Darfur before he was captured by the Mahdists. He seemed 

 dazed and almost distraught, but on his anival at the capital 

 he was received with acclamation and general rejoicings. 

 In course of a surprisingly short space of time he regained his 

 normal condition, and became once more a power in the land. 



Eventually he was appointed Sirdar, but when the Great War 

 broke out in 1914, he being nominally an Austrian subject 

 decided that it behoved him to resign his position under the 

 British aegis, and to repair to the land of his birth, where, as 

 matters turned out, he proved of inestimable service and 



