The new harvest came only in time to save the inhabitants of the Soudan from becoming extinct.  The remnant were preserved for further misfortunes.  War, scarcity, and oppression there had always been.  But strange and mysterious troubles began to afflict the tortured tribes.  The face of heaven was pitiless or averted.  In 1890 innumerable swarms of locusts descended on the impoverished soil.  The multitude of their red or yellow bodies veiled the sun and darkened the air, and although their flesh, tasting when roasted like fried shrimps, might afford a delicate meal to the natives, they took so heavy a toll of the crops that the famine was prolonged and scarcity became constant.  Since their first appearance the locusts are said to have returned annually [Ohrwalder, ten years’ captivity.] Their destructive efforts were aided by millions of little red mice, who destroyed the seeds before they could grow.  So vast and immeasurable was the number of these tiny pests that after a heavy rain the whole country was strewn with, and almost tinted by, the squirrel-coloured corpses of the drowned.

Yet, in spite of all the strokes of fate, the Khalifa maintained his authority unshaken.  The centralisation which always occurs in military States was accelerated by the famine.  The provincial towns dwindled; thousands and tens of thousands perished; but Omdurman continually grew, and its ruler still directed the energies of a powerful army.  Thus for the present we might leave the Dervish Empire.  Yet the gloomy city of blood, mud, and filth that arose by the confluence of the Niles deserves a final glance while still in the pride of independent barbarism.

It is early morning, and the sun, lifting above the horizon, throws the shadows of the Khartoum ruins on the brimful waters of the Nile.  The old capital is solitary and deserted.  No sound of man breaks the silence of its streets.  Only memory broods in the garden where the Pashas used to walk, and the courtyard where the Imperial envoy fell.  Across the river miles of mud houses, lining the banks as far as Khor Shambat, and stretching back into the desert and towards the dark hills, display the extent of the Arab metropolis.  As the sun rises, the city begins to live.  Along the road from Kerreri a score of camels pad to market with village produce.  The north wind is driving a dozen sailing-boats, laden to the water’s edge with merchandise, to the wharves.  One of Gordon’s old steamers lies moored by the bank.  Another, worked by the crew that manned it in Egyptian days, is threshing up the Blue Nile, sent by the Khalifa to Sennar on some errand of State.  Far away to the southward the dust of a Darfur caravan breaks the clear-cut skyline with a misty blur.