Gunpowder Treason and Plot Part 6

Meanwhile Bimbashi Jones slept very soundly and dreamed very absurdly.

He dreamed that he had arrived at Atbara in the nick of time. A terrific battle had raged for many hours, and the result up to the moment of his arrival had been most disastrous to the Anglo-Egyptian forces. The Khalifa himself and two of his emirs, hearing of the bimbashi's approach, had personally pursued the hero almost up to the muzzles of the British guns, in order to prevent the great disaster to their hosts which his arrival among the British and Egyptian forces would be sure to entail. He would lead them, the Khalifa knew, to victory, once he placed himself at their head, and triumph would at the last moment be s.n.a.t.c.hed from his hand. For, indeed, every English officer from the Sirdar to the youngest subaltern of a British regiment was already either killed or incapacitated. Our troops were on the point of collapsing. Already the Soudanese and Egyptian regiments were throwing down their rifles and looking over their shoulders for the safest point of the compa.s.s, with an eye to successful flight. Far away on the left a long line of hussars disappeared in the dim distance, pursued by countless hosts of Bagghara hors.e.m.e.n, shouting "Allah," and shaking spears like leaves in the south-west wind. English sergeants went along the lines with tears in their eyes, crying like babies, entreating, imploring, threatening; the Sirdar sat with his back to a gun-carriage, badly wounded.

[Ill.u.s.tration: "_The Khalifa himself and two of his emirs pursued the hero._" Page 87.]

"Is that you, Bimbashi Jones?" he cried faintly. "Thank Heaven! hurrah!

We shall save the show yet.--Orderly, ride round and spread the news quickly; say Bimbashi Jones is here and about to take the field. Let the enemy know it too; let Mahmoud know it--the rascal! He would attack us before Jones could arrive, would he?"

The effect of the news was electric--nay, magic! From company to company, from regiment to regiment, from brigade to brigade, the word went round. Then a low murmur began to spread; it grew and grew; like the sound of the wind in the tree-tops it widened and thickened, until the whole air was cleft and shivered with the mighty roar that spread from end to end of the battle plain. "Bimbashi Jones has arrived! The bimbashi has taken the field! Die, Dervishes, like dogs!"

And a wail, like the cry of a million souls in torment, rose from the Dervish ranks. "The bimbashi has come! We are lost! Run for your lives, ye servants of Mohammed, for your lives!"

The Khalifa heard it as he sat and trembled in his palace at Omdurman, to which he had quickly returned, seeing that the bimbashi had escaped him. (Jones, it will be observed, had, like most dreamers, annihilated time and s.p.a.ce.) The Khalifa ordered his best white Arab steed, and mounted it, and rode forth to learn what the noise was about. Jones met him as he and his troops chased the Dervish host towards Khartoum, and shouted to him to yield.

"I surrender to no one but the Sirdar or Bimbashi Jones!" cried Abdullah, who, during the late pursuit, had not caught sight of the hero's face.

"You are too young to be either of these great men.--Allah! Allah! Turn and strike, sons of the Prophet! down with the dogs!"

His followers whispered to the Khalifa.

As when rude Boreas, suddenly remembering that he is due in another portion of the globe, ceases abruptly to beat the tortured sea into foam, and a beauteous calm overspreads the waters of the storm-tossed ocean, so suddenly the countenance of the Khalifa changed from rage and defiance to an expression of timorous incredulity.

"Impossible!" he muttered--"so young, and so great a general!"

"Undoubtedly it is Bimbashi Jones!" said an emir.

Jones heard him quite distinctly.

"Yes, I am Bimbashi Jones," he said; "yield, Abdullah; there is no other course. Yield or perish!"

"You will not cut off my right hand and ear?" asked the Khalifa.

"Certainly not, richly though you deserve it," said Jones.

"Nor my left?" added the Khalifa quickly, glancing cunningly in Jones's face.

The bimbashi disclaimed any such intention.

Then the Khalifa surrendered, placing his sword in Jones's hands with the inimitable grace of a cavalier of olden time; which circ.u.mstance, however, did not strike the bimbashi as in any degree strange, but only highly decorous and proper.

And now telegrams of congratulation poured in. Every one of the wounded British officers quickly recovered; even several whom the bimbashi knew to have been killed turned up again (without causing him any surprise) to shake the hero by the hand. In the gilded halls of Omdurman he was the admired of all beholders. The ladies vied to dance with him, though none of them explained how they got there; while the men spoke of impending promotions, peerages, and what not.

As for the Khalifa, he sat next to Bimbashi Jones at supper, and did his very best to convert the young man to Mohammedanism; and to everything that the Khalifa advanced, the Sirdar, sitting on Jones's left, would remark,--

"There's a good deal in what the old boy says."

There was indeed, Jones thought, for--and this was the only circ.u.mstance in the whole affair that caused him some surprise--the Khalifa simply preached at him a sermon which Jones's own father (Vicar of Stoke Netherby, Yorkshire, and certainly not a follower of the Prophet) had delivered from his own pulpit on the very last Sunday that the bimbashi had spent in the old home.

"Why," he remarked, when the Khalifa had quite finished, "you are a pious fraud, my good man. Are you aware that you have stolen that sermon, word for word, from my own father, who preached it--"

"Bimbashi Jones--Alaric, my boy--don't you know me?" said the Khalifa very gushingly; and Jones was just about to recognize his parent, whom indeed the Khalifa promptly declared himself to be in very flesh, and to rush to his arms, when he awoke, and the whole thing was spoiled, the dream ending and the curtain falling upon a highly-dramatic situation, somewhat mysterious withal, and left entirely unexplained. Poor Bimbashi Jones was now no longer the victorious preserver of the honour of England and the safety of Egypt; he was but his own unfortunate self, a forlorn piece of jetsam cast ash.o.r.e upon the sand-ocean of the Soudan, with sand-scud flying like solid sea-spray, and filling his eyes and nose and mouth and clothes, blotting out tracks and directions, and reducing poor Jones to a condition of great misery and wretchedness. He would have felt even more wretched had he realized that, by falling off his camel and sleeping on while it walked away, he had landed himself in a very serious position indeed. He was in the midst of a sand-storm.

The bimbashi stood and raged, shouting for his servant Ali, upon whose head he showered many useless abuses and sundry flowers of speech.

But Ali was far away by this time, and so was Jones's camel; and after waiting for half an hour or more, the lost youth decided that he must make a guess at the direction to be pursued, and at any rate keep moving, even though he followed a wrong course; better that than be buried alive in the abominable moving desert of flying and stinging sand.

It was only natural that Jones's guess as to the direction in which lay Atbara should be somewhat out; it would have been strange indeed if he had guessed right. As a matter of fact, his attempt to do so was by no means a bad one; for, had he directed his steps but a point or two less towards the east, he would have hit off the English position nicely, and would soon have encountered the search-party which presently came out to find him, or have been overtaken by some other friendly company hurrying forward from Berber towards the scene of operations at the junction of Atbara and Nile.

Luckily Jones had sandwiches in his pocket, though he would rather have had a gallon or two of water. The drop or so of whisky in his flask did nothing to a.s.suage his thirst. His throat was parched with the sand, his tongue dry and hot and gritty. He could scarcely see; his ears were clogged. Jones plodded along, now praying for help in his most serious plight--he knew that it was serious, though he scarcely realized perhaps _how_ serious; now recalling his dream and laughing at it; now thinking of every conceivable thing that would serve to blot out the disagreeable present, if but for a few minutes.

Meanwhile the sun had come out, and was blazing away in a manner which made life under its direct rays an unpleasant and almost impossible function. Soon it became unbearable. The wind had dropped, and the sand ceased to fly--a mercy for which Jones felt devoutly grateful. But the heat! The poor lost bimbashi scooped a hole in the ground, piling the displaced sand as high as he could, and lying behind it, in order to get a little shade for his face; and there he lay and sweltered until the sun climbed too high, and drove him out of his shelter. Then he travelled on, his brain on fire, until the burning disc above him had sunk sufficiently to allow him to repeat his expedient of earlier in the day; and now he lay half asleep, half comatose, until the cool of evening revived him, and he rose and plodded forward once more.

"I shall go on till I drop, anyway!" soliloquized Bimbashi Jones, like the brave man he was; and then, because he was still a very young man, and because he felt, as any one justly might do under the circ.u.mstances, extremely sorry for himself, he shed a few tears of pity over the melancholy fate which impended. "I might have done rather well," he reflected. "I had made a good start--every one said so; but misfortune dogs me wherever I go!" and Jones thought of his disappointment in England, of his illness at Cairo, of this crowning disaster; and he shed a few more consoling tears.

That night Jones, plodding obstinately forward, stumbling, weary, only half conscious, nearly dead with thirst, struck suddenly into country of a different character from the unbroken sand plain through which he had been travelling up to this moment. There was scrub to be pushed through, mimosa bushes, and other greenery.

"Thanks be to G.o.d!" exclaimed the bimbashi, for even his baked brain was able to comprehend the significance of the change. "I am coming to the Nile!"

It was not the Nile but the Atbara which Jones had struck well above the Anglo-Egyptian portion; but, oh! the joy of that first big drink of nasty water, and the long-continued, delicious sluicing of the burning head, wherein the fire had raged without ceasing for a twelve-hour round, and would scarcely now be extinguished even though Jones would bring the whole flood of the Atbara to bear upon it.

Then Jones finished his sandwiches and felt a man once more, though a weary one. He thanked Heaven for mercies received, and lay down to sleep until wakened by--yes, actually by the cold. He must move on.

How different the travelling was now! He would not leave the river again, the wanderer wisely resolved. He would follow it until the British position was reached; it could not be far now.

Poor bimbashi! The British fort lay behind him, and he was speeding away in the wrong direction--into the arms, indeed, of Mahmoud, had he only known it.

Part of the night he pushed forward, and part of it he rested and slept.

"It's a ghastly long journey when one does it on foot," thought the lost bimbashi. "However, I shall be in camp by breakfast time;" and his mouth watered over imaginary repasts of tinned meats and tea and other delights.

Morning came, and the sun, and still there were no signs of the camp.

Jones was very hungry, but the tinned delicacies were still the fair offspring of imagination, which filleth not the stomach.

He travelled on, in despite of the sun, for the camp _could_ not now be far off; and he would have continued to plod forward until he dropped, but that he received before noon a terrible fright, which sent him into cover for many hours of dangerous daylight.

There were sounds of hoofs, and the soul of the bimbashi rejoiced. "It is some of our fellows doing a cavalry reconnoitre," he reflected; and when they came, as he judged by the sound, within earshot, he treated them to a "coo-ee," and stood up to look out for a view and to hear their reply.

Presently the troop pa.s.sed across an open patch between mimosa bushes, and Jones saw, not hussars or lancers, but a number of Bagghara hors.e.m.e.n pushing rapidly upstream, and evidently looking about for the owner of the voice lately upraised.

Down bobbed Jones behind a mimosa bush, his heart beating loudly. He drew his revolver in case of accidents. Would they see him? if so--

There were ten men, dirty, savage-looking fellows. They wore white, patched, linen garments, which fluttered behind them, and carried spears. They pa.s.sed within twenty paces, peering about, and repa.s.sed again fifty yards away, talking together and arguing; then they disappeared.

"Thank G.o.d for that!" thought the bimbashi. "One wouldn't care to be chewed up by a set of such forsaken-looking fellows at close quarters!"

So he lay low till dark, and then pushed on once more--desperately hungry now, nearly starving. Would that breakfast never come? Could he have made some mistake? Ought he to have gone downstream?

Reason said no--upstream undoubtedly. But, you see, the bimbashi's geography was imperfect, and he was not aware of the existence of the Atbara, as a river, or he had forgotten it. He only knew of Fort Atbara; he thought he was following the Nile.