I was locked up in the Umm Hagar on the night of his death, and the fever was then taking hold of me; two days later I was senseless, and of course helpless. Hasseena, with two boys, used to carry me about from shade to shade as the sun travelled, but my neck-chain dragged, and sometimes tripped one or the other up, and then it was that orders were given to remove it. Hasseena had been told that the best remedy for me was a description of vegetable marrow soaked in salt water; the water was drunk and the marrow eaten as the patient recovered. The purgative properties of this medicine might suit Soudan constitutions, and it evidently suited mine at the time, but I should warn any of my readers, should they be so unfortunate as to contract this fever, against attempting the remedy. When the decoction has acted sufficiently, the mouth is crammed with butter, which to the throat, at this stage of the “cure,” feels like boiling oil, and you experience all the sensations of internal scalding. The next operation is to briskly rub the whole body, and then anoint it with butter or oil—butter by preference. The patient has nothing to say about his treatment—he is helpless; every bit of strength and will has left him, and when he has been rolled up in old camel-cloths and “sweated,” weakness hardly expresses the condition he has arrived at. It was on the thirteenth day of my attack that I reached |110| the final stage of my treatment, and then I fell asleep, waking some hours later with a clear head and all my faculties about me, though I was then but a living skeleton. The Khaleefa, hearing of my condition, thought it a favourable opportunity for me to receive a few more lessons in Mahdieh, and my period of convalescence was much prolonged owing to the worry and annoyance which these teachers of Mahdieh were to me. Kadi Hanafi, one of Slatin’s old Kadis, then imprisoned with me owing to his open avowal that the justice and the sentences given by the Mehkemmeh (religious courts) were against the teachings of the Quoran, told me that it was a mistake on my part so openly to defy the Khaleefa, and that it would be more “politique” to submit as had Slatin, who had now his house, wives, slaves, horses and donkeys, and cultivated land outside the city. But in my then condition, a little procession, for which my dead body would be the reason, was much more to my liking, and I did not care in what shape death came, provided that it did come.