I must leave it to my readers to try and imagine what my sensations were as I sailed away from Omdurman on the first stage of my journey to civilization and liberty. Remembering the reason which I gave my wife, manager, and friends, when I was begged to abandon my projected journey into Kordofan, knowing that others knew how I had comported myself before my captors and Abdullahi, I was conscious that I had nothing to be ashamed of in the production of a worse than useless saltpetre, which I could easily have refined—but the real refinement of which I prevented. Nor was I ashamed of having designed impossible machines for the manufacture of powder and cartridges, in order to keep out of that terrible Saier; nor of the wilful destruction of so much good material for their construction, especially as there were living witnesses to bear me out. Thinking, therefore, that the small, very small, risk I ran in the collecting of information to send to the advancing armies might have been appreciated, I built up on my journey what proved to be a house of cards to be blown down by |290| a breath as soon as I reached Cairo. I was much disappointed in the reception awaiting me; so also was every other released captive, and not a few Mahdists. Perhaps I am to blame for delaying at Berber for the purpose I have “admitted” in my chapter “Divorced and Married,” when my arrival had been announced by a certain train; but I have been punished for this, though even now I am too uncivilized to feel ashamed of the action, or to appreciate the justice of the strictures passed upon me in consequence. When at last I did reach Cairo, it was but to learn that although I had taken as “jokes” the compliments which I received on my way down, on the “manufacture of gunpowder with which to kill English soldiers”—on the “‘damned clever’ design and construction of the forts to oppose the advance of the gunboats,” on my “smartness in galloping away from the field when I saw it was all over for Mahdieh, and reaching the prison just in time to get on my chains again before the Sirdar put in his appearance”—yet these, and a great many other tales, were implicitly believed in. Moreover, they had lost nothing in being translated into the many languages spoken in Cairo, which include every language of Europe, with a few of the East.