The flogging has already been described. When a stoning to death was to take place, a hole was dug in the ground, and the woman buried to her neck in it. The crowd stood facing the victim, about fifteen to twenty yards distant, and on a given signal the stoning commenced; but it is only right to say that the Soudanese themselves hated and feared taking part in such an execution. None of the stones thrown had, singly, the force or weight to cause stunning or death, and the horrid spectacle was presented of what appeared to be a trunkless head, slightly jerking backwards and forwards and from side to side to avoid the stones being hurled at it, and this ordeal continued for an hour or more. Sometimes a relative or friend, under pretence of losing his temper in upbraiding or cursing the woman, smashed in her head with one of the small axes usually carried by the Soudanese, thus putting her at once out of her torture and misery. Shortly before sunset, the relatives and friends would come out to take away the body and give it decent burial, for the soul had fled, purified with the woman’s blood, to the next world. Knowing what would be the result of a confession, it will be wondered that any woman ever did confess; the number who did so is, admittedly, small. In one of the three cases of stoning to death I know of, the confession was extorted by torture, and the poor woman preferred the horrible but certain death by the time the sun set, to the lingering death she was enduring from day to day. Thousands of women were charged with the breaking of this particular rule |138| or commandment of the Mahdi, but almost all the charges were made by other women—and this, too, out of sheer jealousy, not from any feeling of outraged morality. I may now proceed with the narration of the quandary Hasseena had placed us in, herself included. I had been kept chained and closely confined for nineteen months, and was under Idris es Saier’s particular supervision; Hasseena, during the same period, had been a servant in his hareem, and also in his entire charge. If I claimed the paternity of the child, the probabilities were that Idris would get into trouble with the Khaleefa; if Idris claimed it, his head might be in danger, for decapitation or hanging was the punishment ordered for the male offender, and in all cases Hasseena was liable to flogging or stoning to death. Again, if I claimed the paternity of the child, and there were reasonable grounds after its birth to believe that the paternity should be looked for in some other direction, and I knew that it should be; then, while Idris would clear himself to the Khaleefa, I should have been punished for lying to him, and Hasseena would be in the same predicament as before.