Position 99 - The Tomb Of The Mahdi At Omdurman —kerreri Hills At Left, Scene Of Kitchener's Victory—sudan

This is perhaps the most significant monument which we could find here at the terminus of the long 576-mile journey from Wadi Halfa. If you will look at the map (No. 20), you will find that Omdurman is on the left bank of the White Nile, just where the Blue Nile flows into it. As we stand now both rivers are here on our right, but quite out of range. We face northeast, that is, down stream, and Khartum is also here on our right, but out of range on the south bank of the Blue Nile just above its junction with the White Nile.

When Gordon entered Khartûm in February, 1884, in the endeavor to save the Sudan from the Mahdi, he rode to his death, and the small body of troops sent for his relief, which nearly a year later succeeded in forcing their way into Khartûm under General Sir Charles Wilson, found that the town had fallen but two days before, and that Gordon had perished. It was not until the year 1896 that, beginning the construction of the railway through the desert from Wadi Halfa, the Egyptians, under British officers and with a nucleus of English regulars, advanced for the recovery of the Sudan and the upper river.

Enjoying constant and rapid railway connection with his base at Wadi Halfa, Sir Herbert Kitchener pushed the desert railway rapidly forward, and on September 2, 1898, out on the slopes of the Kerreri hills, which you see on the left, he fought a decisive battle with the dervishes, who, advancing recklessly with an army of 35,000 men, were met by a steady fire from modern weapons, which killed and wounded over 25,000, while the balance were half of them taken prisoners.

The bones of the fallen dervishes still whiten the plain out by those hills. Kitchener entered the town on the afternoon of the same day, when the native Egyptian troops, although themselves Mohammedans, blew up the tomb before us, and thus prevented it from becoming a shrine to which the fanatical dervishes were beginning to make annual pilgrimages; for such pilgrimages might have resulted in religious uprisings like that of the once potent Mahdi.

The tomb is, you see, a low, roofless building, with arched windows, surrounded by a court with an arched door on the right. The low roof on the right beyond this court is the Mahdi's house, over which you see two handball courts of the British officers of the garrison. The entire town, which the Mahdi had built as his capital, consists of crude one-story houses, built of sun-dried brick. Had we stood where we now stand before Kitchener's capture of the place our lives would have not been worth a turn of the hand, but now it is as safe as the streets of your own town, and the Khalifa, the Mahdi's successor, who might have made further trouble, was overtaken in his flight, and fell with the few followers who still clung to him.

The place under the Mahdists was really only a large and permanent military camp, which, after the Mahdi's death in 1885, was for fourteen years the residence of his successor, Abdullahi Taishi, often called the Khalipha, which means representative or successor. This bloodthirsty fanatic made the place the scene of the most horrible cruelties. The Europeans whom he held as captives were cruelly imprisoned or slain, except when the Khalipha had need of their services. Thus the German, Neufeld, was forced to build parts of this tomb of the Mahdi, which the native workmen were incapable of executing, and the Austrian, Slatin, now Slatin Pacha, was a slave and body-servant of the tyrant.

Both these men escaped, and the flight of the latter, which he narrates in his book, “Fire and Sword in the Sudan,” is one of the most remarkable feats of modern times. The natives also were treated by the Khalipha with monstrous cruelty, and tortured and slain at the slightest provocation. The place of execution was the market on our left, but not within our present field of vision, and near there is a spot now called the “Tomb of the Martyrs,” a pit into which the heads and limbs of the victims were cast.

The Khalipha was able to maintain himself, in spite of his cruelty and tyranny, by the support of his tribe, the Baggara, who were powerful and numerous enough to hold the decimated tribes of the Sudan in subjection, and save the Khalipha from an otherwise inevitable uprising, which would have cost him both his rule and his life. He transferred the whole of the Baggara to this town and built a strong quarter for them, enclosed by a heavy wall, of which you can see one side from here.

It is that dark line of wall running obliquely across our field of vision, from the handball courts on the right, toward the Kerreri hills on the left. There the Khalipha took care so to favor the Baggara, that they should always remain faithful to him. Thus when the neglect of agriculture, caused by the existing misgovernment and the annihilation of whole tribes, brought on a frightful famine, the Khalipha delivered grain to the Baggara from his own magazines at the abnormal price of six dollars an arteb, although the market price was sixty dollars here at Omdurman, and at Kassala it even reached two hundred and forty dollars for a time.

At that time people flocked to this place by thousands, and died here in myriads like flies; for all the lands in the vicinity had been confiscated by the Khalipha and given to the Baggara, so that there was nothing for the newcomers from other tribes. Father Ohrwalder, an Austrian priest, who had been seized by the Mahdi as a prisoner, while engaged in missionary work at the outbreak of the revolt, estimates, as he said, at that time, that “upwards of three-fourths of the population of the Sudan has been destroyed by war, famine and disease.”

But in spite of misrule, this town grew until it now has accommodation for at least 100,000 people. Its population is at present an indescribable mixture of the lowest African and Levantine elements, and the market which was once the scene of such atrocious barbarities is now an animated scene of traffic in the products of the Sudan. See Map 20 for our last standpoint.