Between the prison and the Nile no houses stood, and at this time the prisoners were allowed, so long as daylight lasted, to stumble in their chains down the half-mile of broken sloping earth to the Nile bank, so that they might draw water for their use and perform their ablutions. For the native or the negro, then, escape was not so difficult. For along that bank the dhows were moored3 and they were numerous; the river traffic, such as there was of it, had its harbour there, and the wide foreshore made a convenient market-place. Thus the open space between the river and the House of Stone was thronged4 and clamorous6 all day, captives rubbed elbows with their friends, concerted plans of escape, or then and there slipped into the thickest of the crowd and made their way to the first blacksmith, with whom the price of iron outweighed7 any risk he took. But even on their way to the blacksmith's shop, their fetters8 called for no notice in Omdurman. Slaves wore them as a daily habit, and hardly a street in all that long brown treeless squalid city was ever free from the clink of a man who walked in chains.
But for the European escape was another matter. There were not so many white prisoners but that each was a marked man. Besides relays of camels stationed through the desert, much money, long preparations, and above all, devoted10 natives who would risk their lives, were the first necessities for their evasion11. The camels might be procured12 and stationed, but it did not follow that their drivers would remain at the stations; the long preparations might be made and the whip of the gaoler overset them at the end by flogging the captive within an inch of his life, on a suspicion that he had money; the devoted servant might shrink at the last moment. Colonel Trench13 began to lose all hope. His friends were working for him, he knew. For at times the boy who brought his food into the prison would bid him be ready; at times, too, when at some parade of the Khalifa's troops he was shown in triumph as an emblem14 of the destiny of all the Turks, a man perhaps would jostle against his camel and whisper encouragements. But nothing ever came of the encouragements. He saw the sun rise daily beyond the bend of the river behind the tall palm trees of Khartum and burn across the sky, and the months dragged one after the other.
On an evening towards the end of August, in that year when Durrance came home blind from the Soudan, he sat in a corner of the enclosure watching the sun drop westwards towards the plain with an agony of anticipation15. For however intolerable the heat and burden of the day, it was as nothing compared with the horrors which each night renewed. The moment of twilight16 came and with it Idris es Saier, the great negro of the Gawaamah tribe, and his fellow-gaolers.
"Into the House of Stone!" he cried.
Praying and cursing, with the sound of the pitiless whips falling perpetually upon the backs of the hindmost, the prisoners jostled and struggled at the narrow entrance to the prison house. Already it was occupied by some thirty captives, lying upon the swamped mud floor or supported against the wall in the last extremities17 of weakness and disease. Two hundred more were driven in at night and penned there till morning. The room was perhaps thirty feet square, of which four feet were occupied by a solid pillar supporting the roof. There was no window in the building; a few small apertures19 near the roof made a pretence20 of giving air, and into this foul21 and pestilent hovel the prisoners were packed, screaming and fighting. The door was closed upon them, utter darkness replaced the twilight, so that a man could not distinguish even the outlines of the heads of the neighbours who wedged him in.
Colonel Trench fought like the rest. There was a corner near the door which he coveted23 at that moment with a greater fierceness of desire than he had ever felt in the days when he had been free. Once in that corner, he would have some shelter from the blows, the stamping feet, the bruises24 of his neighbour's shackles25; he would have, too, a support against which to lean his back during the ten interminable hours of suffocation26.
"If I were to fall! If I were to fall!"
That fear was always with him when he was driven in at night. It worked in him like a drug producing madness. For if a man once went down amid that yelling, struggling throng5, he never got up again—he was trampled27 out of shape. Trench had seen such victims dragged from the prison each morning; and he was a small man. Therefore he fought for his corner in a frenzy28 like a wild beast, kicking with his fetters, thrusting with his elbows, diving under this big man's arm, burrowing29 between two others, tearing at their clothes, using his nails, his fists, and even striking at heads with the chain which dangled30 from the iron ring about his neck. He reached the corner in the end, streaming with heat and gasping31 for breath; the rest of the night he would spend in holding it against all comers.
"If I were to fall!" he gasped32. "O God, if I were to fall!" and he shouted aloud to his neighbour—for in that clamour nothing less than a shout was audible—"Is it you, Ibrahim?" and a like shout answered him, "Yes, Effendi."
Trench felt some relief. Between Ibrahim, a great tall Arab of the Hadendoas, and Trench, a friendship born of their common necessities had sprung up. There were no prison rations9 at Omdurman; each captive was dependent upon his own money or the charity of his friends outside. To Trench from time to time there came money from his friends, brought secretly into the prison by a native who had come up from Assouan or Suakin; but there were long periods during which no help came to him, and he lived upon the charity of the Greeks who had sworn conversion33 to the Mahdist faith, or starved with such patience as he could. There were times, too, when Ibrahim had no friend to send him his meal into the prison. And thus each man helped the other in his need. They stood side by side against the wall at night.
"Yes, Effendi, I am here," and groping with his hand in the black darkness, he steadied Trench against the wall.
A fight of even more than common violence was raging in an extreme corner of the prison, and so closely packed were the prisoners that with each advance of one combatant and retreat of the other, the whole jostled crowd swayed in a sort of rhythm, from end to end, from side to side. But they swayed, fighting to keep their feet, fighting even with their teeth, and above the din18 and noise of their hard breathing, the clank of their chains, and their imprecations, there rose now and then a wild sobbing34 cry for mercy, or an inhuman35 shriek36, stifled37 as soon as uttered, which showed that a man had gone down beneath the stamping feet. Missiles, too, were flung across the prison, even to the foul earth gathered from the floor, and since none knew from what quarter they were flung, heads were battered38 against heads in the effort to avoid them. And all these things happened in the blackest darkness.
For two hours Trench stood in that black prison ringing with noise, rank with heat, and there were eight hours to follow before the door would be opened and he could stumble into the clean air and fall asleep in the zareeba. He stood upon tiptoe that he might lift his head above his fellows, but even so he could barely breathe, and the air he breathed was moist and sour. His throat was parched39, his tongue was swollen40 in his mouth and stringy like a dried fig22. It seemed to him that the imagination of God could devise no worse hell than the House of Stone on an August night in Omdurman. It could add fire, he thought, but only fire.
"If I were to fall!" he cried, and as he spoke41 his hell was made perfect, for the door was opened. Idris es Saier appeared in the opening.
"Make room," he cried, "make room," and he threw fire among the prisoners to drive them from the door. Lighted tufts of dried grass blazed in the darkness and fell upon the bodies of the prisoners. The captives were so crowded they could not avoid the missiles; in places, even, they could not lift their hands to dislodge them from their shoulders or their heads.
"Make room," cried Idris. The whips of his fellow-gaolers enforced his command, the lashes42 fell upon all within reach, and a little space was cleared within the door. Into that space a man was flung and the door closed again.
Trench was standing43 close to the door; in the dim twilight which came through the doorway44 he had caught a glimpse of the new prisoner, a man heavily ironed, slight of figure, and bent45 with suffering.
"He will fall," he said, "he will fall to-night. God! if I were to!" and suddenly the crowd swayed against him, and the curses rose louder and shriller than before.
The new prisoner was the cause. He clung to the door with his face against the panels, through the chinks of which actual air might come. Those behind plucked him from his vantage, jostled him, pressed him backwards47 that they might take his place. He was driven as a wedge is driven by a hammer, between this prisoner and that, until at last he was flung against Colonel Trench.
The ordinary instincts of kindness could not live in the nightmare of that prison house. In the daytime, outside, the prisoners were often drawn48 together by their bond of a common misery49; the faithful as often as not helped the infidel. But to fight for life during the hours of darkness without pity or cessation was the one creed50 and practice of the House of Stone. Colonel Trench was like the rest. The need to live, if only long enough to drink one drop of water in the morning and draw one clean mouthful of fresh air, was more than uppermost in his mind. It was the only thought he had.
"Back!" he cried violently, "back, or I strike!"—and, as he wrestled51 to lift his arm above his head that he might strike the better, he heard the man who had been flung against him incoherently babbling52 English.
"Don't fall," cried Trench, and he caught his fellow-captive by the arm. "Ibrahim, help! God, if he were to fall!" and while the crowd swayed again and the shrill46 cries and curses rose again, deafening53 the ears, piercing the brain, Trench supported his companion, and bending down his head caught again after so many months the accent of his own tongue. And the sound of it civilised him like the friendship of a woman.
He could not hear what was said; the din was too loud. But he caught, as it were, shadows of words which had once been familiar to him, which had been spoken to him, which he had spoken to others—as a matter of course. In the House of Stone they sounded most wonderful. They had a magic, too. Meadows of grass, cool skies, and limpid54 rivers rose in grey quiet pictures before his mind. For a moment he was insensible to his parched throat, to the stench of that prison house, to the oppressive blackness. But he felt the man whom he supported totter55 and slip, and again he cried to Ibrahim:—
"If he were to fall!"
Ibrahim helped as only he could. Together they fought and wrestled until those about them yielded, crying:—
"Shaitan! They are mad!"
They cleared a space in that corner and, setting the Englishman down upon the ground, they stood in front of him lest he should be trampled. And behind him upon the ground Trench heard every now and then in a lull56 of the noise the babble57 of English.
"He will die before morning," he cried to Ibrahim, "he is in a fever!"
"Sit beside him," said the Hadendoa. "I can keep them back."
Trench stooped and squatted58 in the corner, Ibrahim set his legs well apart and guarded Trench and his new friend.
Bending his head, Trench could now hear the words. They were the words of a man in delirium59, spoken in a voice of great pleading. He was telling some tale of the sea, it seemed.
"I saw the riding lights of the yachts—and the reflections shortening and lengthening60 as the water rippled—there was a band, too, as we passed the pier-head. What was it playing? Not the overture—and I don't think that I remember any other tune61...." And he laughed with a crazy chuckle62. "I was always pretty bad at appreciating music, wasn't I? except when you played," and again he came back to the sea. "There was the line of hills upon the right as the boat steamed out of the bay—you remember there were woods on the hillside—perhaps you have forgotten. Then came Bray63, a little fairyland of lights close down by the water at the point of the ridge64 ... you remember Bray, we lunched there once or twice, just you and I, before everything was settled ... it seemed strange to be steaming out of Dublin Bay and leaving you a long way off to the north among the hills ... strange and somehow not quite right ... for that was the word you used when the morning came behind the blinds—it is not right that one should suffer so much pain ... the engines didn't stop, though, they just kept
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