OUR ENEMY IN THE SOUDAN.

Otago Witness, Issue 2303, 21 April 1898, Page 49

OUR ENEMY IN THE SOUDAN.

His Rule is Ose oj? Cruelty and Terrorism. Sayed Abdullah Ibn Sayed Mohammed, Khalifa of the Soudan, is at present one of the principal stars in Britain's foreign poli- • ical firmament. Here are some entertaining 'acts about him and the city in which he nve?, Omdurman, which the British forces wi!l probably visit ere long. The" Khalifa is fat, fifty, white-haired, quick tempered, avaricious, suspicions, revengeful, and has a harem of 400 wives. He does ail he can to prevent social progress, encourages immorality among his people, is a patron of the slave trade, goes in mortal fear o£ his life, keeps a prison, the dreaded "Saier" — than which there has been po -worse dungeon since the "Black Hole of Calcutta " — can neither read nor write, occasionally preaches in the Mosque, and regularly says hie prayers publicly five times a day. This is the man who, more than his predecessor the Mahdi, resolved on the death of poor Gordon ; in fact, he it was and not die Mahdi who ordered that no quarter should be granted to tha beleaguered garrison of Kbartcuzcr "-:,■<: The Khattfa'* ,%'hting f orce afc tne time when Slatin Pasha was a prisoner in the. Soudan coffs^ted-of 104,930 soldiers, 6600 of which were'cavalry and 64,000 swordsmen and epesrsmen, H3 had 75 field guns and 40,350 rifles, many of them RenxiEgfcons. Several of the latter' have been spoiled through" being cut down in order to make them lighter. , Slavery is practised to a great extent under the' Khalifa's fostering care, and large nncabers of slaves have been marched from Abyssinia, including thousands of Chris- j tians. At one time there was a large impor- j tation of the latter. They arrived at Omdur- } man in a collapsed condition, having left I hundreds of their companions to die on the j road, but as the condition of the survivors did not enable the dealers to sell rapidly they were allowed to drag their weary/ way to the banks of the Nile, where they died by the score, and their corpses were ultimately kicked into the river. A not unusual sight at Omdurman is the arrival of a slave driver who has bad to bring up a drove of slaves for his royal master, say from Darfur, just like a cattle-driver might be engaged in England. With him he will Jiequently bring a large and curious collectbn of ears. The reason of this is that on the road dozens of the slaves have fallen exhausted. Without halting, the ears ,'of the poor suffering wretches have been struck off in order that the driver might have tangible proof to present to bis master that the stoves have died en route. Occasionally some of these poor wretches recover, but mcrs 'often than not it is to fall into the hands of other robbers, and eventually find their way to the Suk er Rskik, the great slave market of Omdurman. >.. The price of slaves vary. An old slave will fetch from 50dol to 80dol — such dollars as they are in the Soudan, lumps of copper silvered over — a middle-aged woman will fetch from 80dol to 120dol ; young girls between eight and eleven, according to looks, from HOdol to 160dol, and "Suryas," or women for the harem, 180dol to 700dol. Marriage is easy, and divorce is cheap. Each man is .entitled to four legal wives, but they are so easily divorced that many men in the course of 10 years have been married 40 cr 50 times at least, and it is common for \ women during that time to have from 15 to 20 husbands. There is, however, one group of women — and they will hail the advent of the British with delight — who have not bad an opportunity of transferring their affections from one lord and master to another. This group consists of the religiou3 Mahdi's wives, for when their common husband died, his successor, the Khaiifa, in order to preserve their sacred character, locked them up, and there they have been all these years, seeing no man and no woman except once a year, when female relatives are allowed to visit them. The streets of Omdurman— if streets the narrow foetid lanes can be so termed— are in a most wretched condition. If a horse or a camel or a donkey dies, the carcase is pitched out into the street, and there it stays until the Kbalifa thinks the streets want to be cleaned, and he gives an order accordingly, which simply means that the offal and filth are swept into the corners and still allowed to remain. When the wet season arrives, an epidemic invariably breaks out. The Saier, or chief prison, is simply a centre of horrors. At a word from the Khalifa the poor wretched victim is marched off to this degrading place, where during tha day he is permitted to grovel about in the dirt and sand of a small barricaded courtyard, and in the night is driven with the other prisoners like sheep into one of the huts. This is the terror of the whole incarceration lor the hats are bo crowded that it is

impossible for anybody to li« down, arid every night there is the scene oi the " Black Hole of Calcutta " enacted. Men and women fight and scramble in order to obtain comfortable standing room and to get as near as possible to the narrow barred window, panting for a breath of air. In the morning it is quite a common thing for the warders to have several dead to haul out, and it is painful to see the living stagger forth into the courtyard bathed in perspiration and cr.mplfttely exhausted by the turmoil of the night. A man who fell under the. Khalifa's displeasure was the well-known Emir Zeki Turnmal, and he was immured in a cell shaped lika a coffin. There was a hole in the side of the coffin for water to be pushed in, and there he lingered, uttering no complaint, bravely meetiag the awful and F,gonisi&g death which sealed his fate 2i hours after his imprisonment. The Khalifa's emissaries watched bis dying agonies through the bole, and laughed at what they considered a very interesting entertainment. There is one European, a man named Charles Neufeld, in the dutches of the Khalifa's warders even now. He suffered the horrible incarceration in the huts of the Saier for some time, till one night be resolutely refused to enter. The result was that ha was- flogged mercilessly, until one of the warders. asked him why he did not cry for mercy" The brave fellow replied that the others.raight do so, but not he. In the end he was "removed to Khartoum, where he has aow a Wetter time, being engaged in refining saltpetre for the Government arsenal. As all tba world knows, two men have escaped from thiß dreadful city, the renowned Rudolf C. Slatin, v who found his way into the Soudan and obtained an appointment under General Gordon, only to be made prisoner at (be fall of Khartoum, and Father Ohrwalder, who was also detained if Omdurman af tev Gordon's death. Neither of them suffered thfi Saier, but they underwent terrible vicissitudes until they fortunately escaped.