One of the queerest cities I have ever visited is Omdurman, once the capital of the Mahdi and to-day the great native commercial centre of the Sudan. Omdurman stretches for more than six miles along the Nile at the point where the Blue Nile flows in from the distant Abyssinian hills. Opposite the city is Tuti Island, while beyond the island on the farther bank of the White Nile is Khartum. Founded by the Mahdi, or the Mohammedan Messiah, and the scene of the most atrocious cruelties and extravagances of the Khalifa who succeeded him, Omdurman once contained about one million of African Sudanese. It was then a great military camp, composed of one hundred thousand mud houses and inhabited by tribes from all parts of the million square miles embraced in the realm of that savage ruler. The Khalifa forced the people to come here to live that he might have their services in time of war, allowing them to go home only to cultivate and harvest their crops, which they were obliged to bring back for sale. He made Omdurman his seat of government, and he had his own residence here inside a great wall of sun-dried brick which enclosed about sixty acres, and in which was an open-air mosque of ten acres or more. Here he had his palace and here he kept his four hundred wives. Just outside the city he fought the great battle which ended in his downfall and the destruction of his capital. According to Mohammedan tradition, the Prophet said that there would arise among the Faithful a sort of Messiah, or Mahdi, which means in Arabic “he who is guided aright.” Mohammed Ahmed, later known as the Mahdi, claimed to be such a leader, and so he founded the empire which lasted until the Battle of Omdurman. He got the people to believe he had been appointed Mahdi by God, and that he had been taken by the Prophet himself into the presence of the apostles and saints, and by them commanded to cleanse and purify the Mohammedan religion. He did anything, however, but practise what he preached. By the Koran, smoking and drinking are strictly prohibited, and extravagance is frowned upon, but in the height of his power the Mahdi and his chiefs lived lives of the most horrible drunkenness, extravagance, and vice. Mohammed Ahmed is described by Slatin Pasha, who was for years a prisoner of the Mahdists in Omdurman, as a tall, broad-shouldered, powerfully built man, with a black beard and the usual three scars on each cheek. He had the V-shaped gap between his two front teeth which the Sudanese consider a sign of good luck and which is said to have been the cause of his popularity among women. Their name for him was Abu Falja, “the man with the separated teeth.” His beautifully washed woollen garments were always scented with a mixture of musk, sandalwood, and attar of roses. This perfume, which was known as the “odour of the Mahdi,” was supposed to equal, if not surpass, that of the dwellers of Paradise.