Our usual food was “Asseeda,” the Soudan dourra (sorghum), roughly pounded moist, and mixed into a thick paste, feeling and tasting to the palate like sawdust. It was not a very nourishing dish, but it was a heavy one, and stayed the pangs and gnawings of hunger. A flavour might be imparted by allowing a quantity to stand for a day or two until fermentation set in. Occasionally, but only occasionally, a sauce |114| made from the pounded seed of the Baamia hybiscus, and called “Mulakh,” could be obtained, and this, with the fermented asseeda, made a veritable banquet. Friends in the town sent us, when they could either afford or obtain it, a little wheaten bread, a bit of cheese or butter, or a few pinches of coffee. [Illustration: CATARINA.] Amongst the many captives in Omdurman who did so much for me stands out prominently Father Ohrwalder, the old Greek lady, Catarina—who was a ministering angel alike to prisoners and captives—Mr. Tramba and his wife Victoria, Nahoum Abbajee, and Youssef Jebaalee. Surely the recording angel has placed to the right side of the account the little deceptions practised by Father Ohrwalder to gain access to the prison, when the few piastres of baksheesh he could afford were not sufficient to satisfy the rapacity of the guards, in order to bring me some little dainty, when, God knows, he was bringing me the lion’s share of what he was in absolute need of himself. At one time he would present himself at the gates as being “Iyyan Khaalas” (sick unto death), and, of course, wished to see me once again before his dissolution. At another time it would be that he had heard _I_ was dying, then, of course, he wished to see _me_; and the changes would be rung by his coming in on the pretext of wishing to see some other prisoner. With bowed head and bent back, exaggerating the weak state he was then in, he would crawl towards me, dragging one foot after the other, and, reaching me, would sit down on the ground and sway his body to and fro—a little pantomime which allowed of his |115| surreptitiously passing to me the dainties he had brought in the old leather bag slung from his left shoulder. Time after time he was turned away from the gates, and this, too, after having paid the baksheesh; but his persistence secured his seeing me every one or two months during my first three years in prison, and the scraps of news he brought from the outside world—news to both of us, though a year or two old—gave me something to think of and turn over in my brain until his next visit. Death, as I told Father Ohrwalder, I did not fear, but my great fear was insanity.