At length, after wandering up and down for miles in the blazing heat, I discovered the whereabouts of our camp out in the desert to the south-west of the town. All my colleagues were here except Villiers. Nobody seemed to know what had become him, and as the hours passed and he failed to turn up we began to get alarmed. His servant had pitched Villiers' umbrella tent, and beside it stood the bicycle, which was disfigured by an honourable scar, for the top of the valve was gone, and Hassan declared that it had been carried away by a Dervish bullet. I mounted the famous machine, intending to go for a ride to the execution ground, where several fine gibbets were standing, but as the back wheel was "buckled" I soon dismounted--with the proud consciousness, however, of being the first cyclist in Omdurman! The streets of the town were perfectly loathsome. In every direction lay the decaying bodies of dead animals, and the stench was terrible. Moslems, from a curious intermixture of humanity and cruelty, never give a dying animal a _coup de grâce_, and they seldom take the trouble to bury the carcass. Moreover, in some parts of the town one could scarcely walk fifty yards without coming across the bodies of men, and occasionally, I am sorry to say, those of women and little children. At least five hundred dead people lay scattered about the streets, some destroyed by Lyddite shells, but the majority pierced with bullets. I saw some of these corpses lying in the shallow water near the bank of the river, and as it seemed to be nobody's business to bury them, it is not surprising that our Guardsmen and other soldiers contracted the germs of enteric fever at Omdurman! Inside the Khalifa's arsenal there were many curious things--spears, bows and arrows, coats of chain mail, machine guns, Krupps, various kinds of ammunition, and other warlike apparatus, ancient and modern. Three carriages of European make were also visible, which were said to have been used by the Khalifa on state occasions, though these vehicles could never have got beyond the main streets, for the simple reason that outside the town no roads exist.