When I had recovered a little from my fever, I |88| was placed upon a camel, and paraded past the huts, rukoobas, and zareebas, which at that time constituted the town of Omdurman. A number of Hadendowas had come in to tender their submission to the Khaleefa; and he had seized the occasion to exhibit me to the “faithful” as the great Pasha sent to conquer from him the Western Soudan, and to impress the Hadendowas. A halt was made at the hut of the Emir Said Mohammad Taher, a relative of the Mahdi, who, after relating his version of the death of Hicks Pasha, and the destruction of his army, both of which events had, according to him, been brought about through the agency of angels sent by the Prophet for the purpose, gave me a long lecture on Mahdieh, at the end of which he asked me my opinion of it. I told him that if he wished for a few lessons himself on religion, and as to how the God I prayed to dealt with His faithful, and the means His teachers in Europe employed for converting people and making them religious, I should be pleased to give him a few. The reply angered him, and another batch of prisoners were, by his orders, told off to lecture me the whole day long on Mahdieh. While quite ready to talk to them about the Mohammedan religion as propounded in the Quoran, I would not believe in the mission of the Mahdi or his new religion. When Taher asked what progress I had made in my “education,” he was told that I would make none in Mahdieh, but was ready to become a Mohammedan. I knew perfectly well what an out-and-out acceptance of Mahdieh meant—my release, but only to be put in charge of some troops, and, as I had |89| fought with the British against the Mahdists, I had no wish to be caught in the dervish ranks, fighting against them, or be found dead on the field, after the fight, in the garb of a dervish, and pierced by a British bullet.