It is, indeed, terrible to think of the awful misery and distress brought upon his own country by this one man. His disease grew rapidly worse; he complained of pain in the heart, and died, on the 22nd of June, 1885, of fatty degeneration of the heart. Some say that he was a victim to the vengeance of a woman who had lost husband and children in the fall of Khartum, and who repaid the Mahdi's outrage on her own person by giving him poison in his food. This may be so; and it is true, poison is generally used in the Sudan to put people out of the way; but I am rather inclined to think that it was outraged nature that took vengeance on its victim; and that it was the Mahdi's debauched and dissolute mode of life which caused his early death. He died in the mortar hut, which I previously described; and his adherents gave out that he was about to travel through the heavens for a space of three years. People were not allowed to say "The Mahdi is dead," but "El Mahdi intakal" (_i.e._ "The Mahdi has been removed"). The shock of his death was terrible. The wild fanatics were, so to speak, struck dumb; their eyes were suddenly opened; and their very confusion showed that they had realized, the Mahdi was a liar. Omdurman was full of suppressed murmuring; and the people were collected in groups, talking of this awful catastrophe. Those who were oppressed believed that the sudden collapse of Mahdieh must result in a revolution. No one believed that the Mahdi's party could continue ruling in his name. Would that some good man could have been found to rapidly seize this opportunity of putting himself at the head of the anti-Mahdiists; he must have been successful! The confusion in the Mahdi's household was beyond description; his women wept and wailed in the wildest grief. Ahmed Wad Suleiman and the Mahdi's nearest relatives prepared a grave immediately beneath the bed on which he had died; the body was washed, wrapped in a shroud, according to the Moslem custom, and, in the presence of the Khalifas and all the members of the Mahdi's family, it was lowered into the grave, amidst the lamentations and wailing of the enormous crowd collected outside the building. Before the grave was filled in, the body was sprinkled with perfumes; then each person present took a handful of earth and threw it into the grave, amidst murmurs of "Ya Rahman, Ya Rahim!" (_i.e._ O merciful, O gracious God!) A simple monument was erected over the tomb. Thus ended the Mahdi--a man who left behind him a hundred thousand murdered men, women, and children, hundreds of devastated towns and villages, poverty, and famine. Upon his devoted head lies the curse of his people whom he had forced into a wild and fanatical war, which brought indescribable ruin upon the country, and which exposed his countrymen to the rule of a cruel tyrant, from whom it was impossible to free themselves.