Like Colonel Farquhar of the Guards, Majors Warren, Martin and other British officers, Roland Lindsay, by his personal example, had done all that in him lay to cheer the weak-limbed and faint-hearted Egyptian soldiers, whose almost sable visages were now gaunt and hollow, and whose white tunics and scarlet tarbooshes were tattered and worn by their long and toilsome march through the terrible country westward of the White Nile--a vast steppe covered with low thorny trees, purple mimosa, gum bushes, and spiky grass, till the sad, solemn, and desert waste was reached near Kashgate, where all--save one or two--were to find their graves! Mounted on a splendid Arab, whose rider he had slain in the battle of the 29th of April, Roland Lindsay led one face of the hollow square in which the troops marched, and in which formation they fought for three days, with baggage, sick and wounded in the centre, Krupp and Nordenfeldt guns in the angles, against a dark and surging human sea of frantic Dervishes, wild Bedouins, and equally wild and savage Mohammedans and Mulattoes, shrieking, yelling, armed with ponderous swords and deadly spears that flashed like thousands of mirrors in the sunshine. The Dervishes came on, the foremost and most fearless, sent by the Mahdi, Mahommed Achmet Shemseddin, who had declared that they must vanquish all, as they had the aid of Heaven, of the Prophet and his legions of unseen angels, as at the battle of Bedr, when he conquered the Koreish. Wild and desperate was the prolonged fighting, the Egyptians knowing that no mercy would be accorded to them, and fearful was the slaughter, till the sand was soaked with blood--till the worn-out square was utterly broken, its living walls dashed to pieces, and hurled against each other under the feet of the victorious Mahdists. In vain did young Lindsay, like other Britons who followed Hicks, endeavour to make some of their men front about; calling on them, sword and revolver in hand, as they flung themselves on the sand now in despair, face downwards, and perished miserably under sword and spear, or fled in abject and uncontrollable terror; but in the end he found himself abandoned, and had to hack his way out of the press through a forest of weapons till he reached the side of General Hicks, who was making a last and desperate charge at the head of his staff alone! Side by side, with a ringing and defiant cheer, these few Britons galloped against the living flood that was led by a sheikh in brilliant floating robes. 'He is the Mahdi--he is the Mahdi!' cried Lindsay, and such Hicks and all who followed him supposed that sheikh, but in mistake, to be.