This was the only portion of the fight in which any part of our position was seriously threatened, and during this second battle--for it practically amounted to this--the Sudanese and Egyptian infantry had most of the fighting to themselves. Right well they fought--one native brigade against some twenty-five thousand Dervishes. Any wavering or panic on the part of these battalions would have been fatal, for during the really critical period of the fight they were quite isolated. Lewis's brigade--their nearest support--was at least nine hundred yards away, and most of the British columns were actually out of sight, advancing along the river a mile and a half in front. The men of the brigade, which comprised the 9th, 10th, and 11th Sudanese and the 2nd Egyptians, were armed with Martinis; and the smoke of the black powder they used interfered to some extent with the accuracy of their fire, which always tends, in the case of native troops, to become rather wild as the excitement of battle grows upon them. Thus it happened that the enemy managed to get to much closer quarters with us than previously. Their foremost ranks sometimes seemed to advance within one hundred and fifty yards of the Sudanese, and when a perfect flood of Sheikh Ed-Din's infantry was let loose from the Kerreri slopes upon Macdonald's rear, some of the Dervishes, despite the withering rifle fire, actually ran up and used their spears against our men, until they were bayoneted or shot down at the very muzzles of the rifles. Another brilliant attempt was made by the Khalifa's cavalry to break the Sudanese lines, and some of the horsemen got within a few yards of the line before they were shot down in detail. One determined standard-bearer, with nothing in his hands except his flagstaff, struggled on heroically to within a dozen yards of the blacks before he fell, riddled with bullets. Efforts had, of course, been made all along the line to lend assistance to Macdonald in his one-handed struggle. The gunboats had joined with his own three batteries in shelling the dense masses under Sheikh Ed-Din, while on the left other batteries had galloped up, and now from the northern slopes of Surgham poured round after round of shell upon the indomitable enemy. Three battalions, too, of the 1st British Brigade had come up at the double, and the Lincolns had been dispatched to aid in the final dispersion of Ed-Din's Dervishes amongst the rugged slopes of Kerreri.