Their suspense was aggravated towards midnight, when the Dervishes began to approach the zeriba.  In the darkness what was thought to be a body of horsemen was seen moving along a shallow khor opposite the right face of the defence.  At the same moment a loud yell was raised by the enemy on the other side.  An uncontrolled musketry fire immediately broke out.  The guns fired blindly up the valley; the infantry wildly on all sides.  The fusillade continued furiously for some time, and when by the efforts of the British officers the troops were restrained, it was found that the Dervishes had retired, leaving behind them a single wounded man.  Occasional shots were fired from the scrub until the morning, but no fresh attack was attempted by the Dervishes.

Meanwhile Captain Fenwick maintained his solitary and perilous position on the hillock.  He was soon surrounded by considerable bodies of the enemy, and as soon as it became dark he was sharply attacked.  But the Dervishes fortunately possessed few rifles, and the officers and troopers, by firing steady volleys, succeeded in holding their ground and repulsing them.  The sound of the guns at Teroi encouraged the Egyptians and revealed the direction of their friends.  With the daylight the Dervishes, who seem throughout the affair to have been poor-spirited fellows, drew off, and the detachment, remounting, made haste to rejoin the main body.

The force, again united, pursued their way to Khor Wintri, where they found the column from Tokar already arrived.  Marching early on the 15th, Major Sidney with 250 men of the Xth Soudanese, the only really trustworthy troops in the force, had reached Khor Wintri the same afternoon.  He drove out the small Dervish post occupying the khor, and was about to bivouac, when he was sharply attacked by a force of Arabs said to have numbered 80 horsemen and 500 foot.  The Soudanese fought with their usual courage, and the Dervishes were repulsed, leaving thirty dead upon the ground.  The regulars had three men wounded.

Up to this point Colonel Lloyd’s plan had been successfully carried out.  The columns from Suakin and Tokar had effected a junction at Khor Wintri on the Erkowit road.  It now remained to await the attack of Osman Digna, and inflict a heavy blow upon him.  It was decided, however, in view of what had occurred, to omit this part of the scheme, and both forces returned together without delay to Suakin, which they reached on the 18th, having lost in the operations eighteen Egyptian soldiers killed and three wounded.

Their arrival terminated a period of anxious doubt as to their fate.  The town, which had been almost entirely denuded of troops, was left in charge of Captain Ford-Hutchinson.  At about two o’clock in the afternoon of the 16th a few stragglers from the Egyptian cavalry with half-a-dozen riderless horses knocked at the gates, and vague but sinister rumours spread on all sides.  The belief that a disaster