Employed in the arsenal at the time was a man named Mohammad Burrai—a Government sympathizer, and a bitter enemy of Mansour and the others; he was entrusted with the attaching of the buoys at the fixed points in the boom. A few days after the boom was sent down the river, and, while I was “practising” the healing art at the gates of the prison, I received an interesting patient; it was Burrai, his head so wrapped up in cloths as to make him unrecognizable. He told me first of the arrangements made for the boom, and how he had succeeded in destroying it. The chains had been laid over the sterns of boats anchored in the Nile from bank to bank, and Burrai had fixed the buoys to them, but instead of making the buoys _fast_ at these points, he merely slipped the rings round the boom so that the buoys could run from one end to the other. The word was given to slip the boom off the boats. The buoys with the force of the current were carried to the centre |251| of the boom, and, with the resistance offered by them to the stream, the cables snapped and were lost. Burrai’s object in coming to me will be divined; having been employed on the construction of the boom, he might, when the English arrived, be shot as a Mahdist, and he wished to tell me, as a “Government man,” what he had done, so that I could speak up for him. This I promised to do. There were no more chains left with which to make another boom, but those terrible boats must be stopped from coming to Omdurman, and Nowraani was sent for to explain his project again. He proposed to take two large tubular boilers, then lying at Khartoum, cut them in two, fill them with powder, seal up the open ends, and fire them by electricity as the boats passed over them. Sirri, the former telegraph-clerk at Berber, was asked to design the electrical apparatus, but he pleaded ignorance of such things. I was next sent to, to give my opinion as to the feasibility of Nowraani’s plan. It was explained to me that each half of the boilers would contain thirty cantars (a ton and a half) of gunpowder; then it was mines, and not torpedoes, the man wished to make; however, the name “torpedo” was always used. I replied that I had heard, as Nowraani said, of torpedoes being used in the sea for the destruction of great ships, but had never heard of them being used in rivers, and I doubted his ability to make them. The Khaleefa was not satisfied with my answer, and sent word that he believed I could assist in the making of them, but would not. To this, again, I said I should be only too |252| pleased to help Nowraani in his work, but what he proposed to do was very dangerous and risky. I said I felt sure that the only result would be an explosion while the torpedoes were being made, and that, while I did not mind being killed myself, I would not like to meet Allah responsible for the lives of others. Perhaps I made a mistake in putting forward religious