Page:A Prisoner of the Khaleefa.djvu/314

250 banks of the Nile. To prevent them from sinking to the bed of the stream, a series of large wooden buoys had been made, and these were to be fixed at intervals along the boom. It had been calculated that the buoys would, with the weight of the chains, be sunk just below the surface of the water, and also keep the chains in a series of loops; these loops were intended to entangle the paddles and propellers of the gunboats, and, while so entangled, Mansour's picked men were to shoot every one on board, and then, releasing the boats, bring them on to Omdurman. That was the arrangement.

Employed in the arsenal at the time was a man named Mohammad Burrai — a Government sympathizer, and a bitter enemy of Mansour and the others; he was entrusted with the attaching of the buoys at the fixed points in the boom. A few days after the boom was sent down the river, and, while I was "practising" the healing art at the gates of the prison, I received an interesting patient; it was Burrai, his head so wrapped up in cloths as to make him unrecognizable. He told me first of the arrangements made for the boom, and how he had succeeded in destroying it. The chains had been laid over the sterns of boats anchored in the Nile from bank to bank, and Burrai had fixed the buoys to them, but instead of making the buoys fast at these points, he merely slipped the rings round the boom so that the buoys could run from one end to the other. The word was given to slip the boom off the boats. The buoys with the force of the current were carried to the centre