When the many escapes from the Saier zareeba became of too common gossip to be any longer concealed, Abdullahi ordered a wall to be built in place |121| of the thorn zareeba, and later, to obviate the necessity of the prisoners going to the Nile banks for drinking water and ablutions, a well was sunk to provide infiltration water for the purposes mentioned.[6] Until these works were ordered to be made, the prisoners were mainly employed in building mud-brick houses for the gaolers; and when these were finished we had to attend to certain of the household duties—the tending of children, sheep, goats, and the carrying of water from the Nile. Of all the tasks set the prisoners, the household duties were the most pleasant, or, at all events, the least distasteful. Most of the gaolers were able to keep up a large establishment on the proceeds of their baksheesh and ill-gotten gains, but with a multiplicity of wives or concubines a very natural result followed—household bickerings and squabbles, in which one wife or concubine was bound to come off worst; and this gave the wide-awake prisoner engaged upon household duties his chance. He would soon detect which concubine was being “put upon,” or whom the women-folk were most jealous of, and in a few days’ time, as a result of his attentions in carrying her pots and pans, and bringing her water as many times in the day as she wished, he would be bemoaning in her sympathetic ears the hard |122| fate of both of them, and trying to persuade her that what she was enduring was far worse than his imprisonment and chains. The old truism that “pity is akin to love” obtains equally as well under the dusky hide of a Soudanese damsel as under the white skin of her European sister, and very soon the pair would be maturing plans for an escape and elopement. The main difficulty was the removal of the man’s chains and a rapid flight to some distant village; but the Soudan ladies are not a whit behind in woman’s resourcefulness face to face with apparent impossibilities. Failing to arrange for a regular flight, the woman would secure some place of hiding in Omdurman itself. She would undertake all the arrangements, and I never knew of a failure in their plans.