One of the queerest cities I have ever visited is Omdurman, once the capital of the Mahdi and to-day the great native commercial centre of the Sudan. Omdurman stretches for more than six miles along the Nile at the point where the Blue Nile flows in from the distant Abyssinian hills. Opposite the city is Tuti Island, while beyond the island on the farther bank of the White Nile is Khartum. Founded by the Mahdi, or the Mohammedan Messiah, and the scene of the most atrocious cruelties and extravagances of the Khalifa who succeeded him, Omdurman once contained about one million of African Sudanese. It was then a great military camp, composed of one hundred thousand mud houses and inhabited by tribes from all parts of the million square miles embraced in the realm of that savage ruler. The Khalifa forced the people to come here to live that he might have their services in time of war, allowing them to go home only to cultivate and harvest their crops, which they were obliged to bring back for sale. He made Omdurman his seat of government, and he had his own residence here inside a great wall of sun-dried brick which enclosed about sixty acres, and in which was an open-air mosque of ten acres or more. Here he had his palace and here he kept his four hundred wives. Just outside the city he fought the great battle which ended in his downfall and the destruction of his capital.

According to Mohammedan tradition, the Prophet said that there would arise among the Faithful a sort of Messiah, or Mahdi, which means in Arabic “he who is guided aright.” Mohammed Ahmed, later known as the Mahdi, claimed to be such a leader, and so he founded the empire which lasted until the Battle of Omdurman. He got the people to believe he had been appointed Mahdi by God, and that he had been taken by the Prophet himself into the presence of the apostles and saints, and by them commanded to cleanse and purify the Mohammedan religion.

He did anything, however, but practise what he preached. By the Koran, smoking and drinking are strictly prohibited, and extravagance is frowned upon, but in the height of his power the Mahdi and his chiefs lived lives of the most horrible drunkenness, extravagance, and vice. Mohammed Ahmed is described by Slatin Pasha, who was for years a prisoner of the Mahdists in Omdurman, as a tall, broad-shouldered, powerfully built man, with a black beard and the usual three scars on each cheek. He had the V-shaped gap between his two front teeth which the Sudanese consider a sign of good luck and which is said to have been the cause of his popularity among women. Their name for him was Abu Falja, “the man with the separated teeth.” His beautifully washed woollen garments were always scented with a mixture of musk, sandalwood, and attar of roses. This perfume, which was known as the “odour of the Mahdi,” was supposed to equal, if not surpass, that of the dwellers of Paradise.

After the siege and capture of Khartum the people who had held out against the Mahdists were put to the most unspeakable tortures, all of them, that is, except the young women and girls. These were reserved for the Mahdi’s harem. For weeks after the battle there went on in his camp at Omdurman the business of choosing from the fairest for his own establishment, while the ones he rejected were turned over to his chief favourites and advisers. After Mohammed Ahmed’s death, which occurred close on the heels of his victory, the Khalifa had the Mahdi’s widows and all the women of his harem imprisoned in a high-walled compound guarded by eunuchs. None was allowed to marry or go out into the world again.

The Omdurman of the present, which is laid on practically the same lines as that of the past, covers almost the same ground, although it has much fewer people. During my trip of to-day I climbed to the top of the old palace of the Khalifa, and took a look over the city.

The houses stretch along the Nile for seven or eight miles, and the water front is fringed with a thicket of boats. Some of the town is on the main stream, and reaches out from the river in all directions. It is a city of mud in every sense of the word. Of its many thousand houses there are not a score which are of more than one story, and you can count on your fingers the houses made of burnt brick. When I first rode through it I asked my guide if the holes in the walls had been made by cannon-balls at the time of the fighting. “Why, man,” he replied, “those are the windows.” Most of the houses are flat roofed, with drain pipes extending out over the street so that when it rains the water pours down on the necks of the passers-by. The one-story mud houses have mud walls about them, and the mud stores face streets paved only with mud. The walls of the vast inclosure of the Khalifa are made of mud bricks, while the houses inside, which now form the quarters of the Anglo-Egyptian soldiers and officers, are of sun-baked dirt.

The Khalifa was so afraid of being assassinated that he had all the houses near his palace torn down, shut himself up in his walled inclosure, and kept at his side a great bodyguard, to which he was forever adding more soldiers. His special apartments in the palace were considered the last word in luxury. They had beautiful curtains and carpets of silk and actually boasted big brass beds with mosquito nets, spoils from the European houses at Khartum.

Standing on the Khalifa’s palace, one can follow many of the streets with one’s eye. Some of them are of great width, but the majority are narrow and winding. The whole city, in fact, is a labyrinth cut up by new avenues laid out by the British, with the holy buildings and the Khalifa’s old government structures in the middle. But the British are improving conditions in Omdurman, and have elaborate plans for its development, including a fine park in the centre of the city.

Each of the towns of the Sudan has a British official to rule it; but under each such governor is a sub-governor who must be a native Egyptian. This man is called the mamour and is the real executive as far as carrying out the orders of the government is concerned. He represents the natives, and understands all about them and their ways. The mamour at Omdurman is an ex-cavalry officer of the army of the Khedive who fought with the British in their wars against the Khalifa. He speaks English well, and as he understands both Turkish and Arabic, he was able to tell me all about the city as we went through.

I came down the Blue Nile from Khartum in a skiff. The distance is about five miles, but we had to tack back and forth all the way, so that the trip took over two hours. The mamour met me on landing. He had a good donkey for me, and we spent the whole day in going through the city, making notes, and taking the photographs which now lie before me.

The people are stranger than any I have ever seen so far in my African travels. They come from all parts of the Sudan and represent forty or fifty-odd tribes. Some of the faces are black, some are dark brown, and others are a rich cream colour. One of the queerest men I met during my journey was an African with a complexion as rosy as that of a tow-headed American baby and hair quite as white. He was a water carrier, dressed in a red cap and long gown. He had two great cans on the ends of a pole which rested on his shoulder, and was trotting through the streets carrying water from one of the wells to his Sudanese customers. His feet and hands, which were bare, were as white as my own. Stopping him, I made him lift his red fez to see whether his hair was white from age. It was flaxen, however, rather than silver, and he told me that his years numbered only twenty-five. The mamour, talking with him in Arabic, learned that he was a pure Sudanese, coming from one of the provinces near the watershed of the Congo. He said that his parents were jet-black but that many men of his colour lived in the region from whence he came. I stood him up against the mud wall in the street with two Sudanese women, each blacker than the ink with which this paper is printed, and made their photographs. The man did not like this at first, but when at the close I gave him a coin worth about twenty-five cents he salaamed to the ground and went away happy.

I am surprised to see how many of these Sudanese have scars on their faces and bodies. Nearly every other man I meet has the marks of great gashes on his cheeks, forehead, or breast, and some of the women are scarred so as to give the idea that terrible brutalities have been perpetrated upon them. As a rule, however, these scars have been self-inflicted. They are to show the tribe and family to which their owners belong. The mamour tells me that every tribe has its own special cut, and that he can tell just where a man comes from by such marks. The scars are of all shapes. Sometimes a cheek will have three parallel gashes, at another time you will notice that the cuts are crossed, while at others they look like a Chinese puzzle.

The dress of the people is strange. Those of the better classes wear long gowns, being clad not unlike the Egyptians. Many of the poor are almost naked, and the boys and girls often go about with only a belt of strings around the waist. The strings, which are like tassels, fall to the middle of the thigh. Very small children wear nothing whatever.

A number of the women wear no clothing above the waist, yet they do not seem to feel that they are immodest. I saw one near the ferry as I landed this morning. She was a good-looking girl about eighteen, as black as oiled ebony, as straight as an arrow, and as plump as a partridge. She was standing outside a mud hut shaking a sieve containing sesame seed. She held the sieve with both hands high up over her head so that the wind might blow away the chaff as the seed fell to the ground. She was naked to the waist, and her pose was almost exactly that of the famed “Vestal Virgin” in the Corcoran Art Gallery at Washington.

Omdurman is the business centre of the Sudan. Goods are sent from here to all parts of the country, and grain, gum arabic, ostrich feathers, ivory, and native cotton are brought in for sale. The town has one hundred restaurants, twenty coffee houses, and three hundred wells. It has markets of various kinds, and there are long streets of bazaars or stores in which each trade has its own section, many of the articles sold being made on the spot. One of the most interesting places is the woman’s market. This consists of a vast number of mat tents or shelters under each of which a woman sits with her wares piled about her. She may have vegetables, grain, or fowls, or articles of native cloth and other things made by the people. The women have the monopoly of the sales here. Men may come and buy, but they cannot peddle anything within the women’s precincts nor can they open stands there. I understand that the women are shrewd traders. Their markets cover several acres and were thronged with black and brown natives as the mamour and I went through.

Not far from the market I came into the great ten-acre square upon which centre the streets of the stores. There are a number of restaurants facing it. In one corner there is a cattle market where donkeys, camels, and horses are sold. The sales are under the government, to the extent that an animal must be sold there if a good title is to go with it. If the transfer is made elsewhere the terms of the bargain may be questioned, so the traders come to the square to do their buying and selling.

It is strange to have shops that sell money. I do not mean stock exchanges or banks, but real stores with money on the counters, stacked up in bundles, or laid away in piles on the shelves. That is what they have in Omdurman. There are caravans going out from here to all parts of north central Africa, and before one starts away it must have the right currency for the journey. In financial matters these people are not far from the Dark Ages. Many of the tribes do not know what coinage means; they use neither copper, silver, nor gold, and one of our dollars would be worth nothing to them. Among many of the people brass wire and beads are the only currency. Strange to say, every locality has its own style of beads, and its favourite wire. If blue beads are popular you can buy nothing with red ones, while if the people want beads of metal it is useless to offer them glass.

In some sections cloth is used as money; in others salt is the medium of exchange. The salt is moulded or cut out of the rocks in sticks, and so many sticks will buy a cow or a camel. The owner of one of the largest money stores of the Sudan is a Syrian, whose shop is not far from the great market. He told me that he would be glad to outfit me if I went into the wilds. I priced some of his beads. Those made of amber were especially costly. He had one string of amber lumps, five in number. Each bead was the size of a black walnut, and he asked for the string the equivalent of about fifteen American dollars. The string will be worn around some woman’s bare waist, and may form the whole wardrobe of the maiden who gets it.

Not far from this bead money establishment the mamour and I entered the street of the silversmiths. This contains many shops in which black men and boys are busy making the barbaric ornaments of the Sudan. Jewellery is the savings bank of this region, and many of the articles are of pure silver and pure gold. Some are very heavy. I priced rings of silver worth five dollars apiece and handled a pair of gold earrings which the jeweller said were worth sixty dollars. The earrings were each as big around as a coffee cup, and about as thick as a lead pencil at the place where they are fastened into the ear. The man who had them for sale was barefooted, and wore a long white gown and a cap of white cotton. His whole dress could not have cost more than ten dollars. He was a black, and he had half-a-dozen black boys and men working away in his shop. Each smith sat on the ground before a little anvil about eight inches high and six inches wide, and pounded at the silver or gold object he was making.

In another shop I saw them making silver anklets as thick as my thumb, while in another they were turning out silver filigree work as fine as any from Genoa or Bangkok. The mamour asked two of the jewellers to bring their anvils out in the sun in order that I might photograph them and they kindly complied.

A little farther on we entered the shoe bazaar, where scores of merchants were selling red leather slippers turned up at the toes, and in a court not far away we found merchants selling hides and leather fresh from the tanneries. They were salting the hides in the square, and laying them out in the sun to dry.

During my stay in this section I bought some ostrich feathers of a merchant who sold nothing else. He had a large stock and his prices were fixed. My feathers cost me about two dollars apiece, but they are the long white plumes of the wild ostrich, which are far finer than any of those from South Africa, where the birds are reared upon farms.

In the Manchester bazaar I found them selling cottons of many kinds and calicoes of gay patterns. There were but few American goods among them, the chief importations being from England and Germany. I saw some American sewing machines in the bazaar of the tailors, and I understand that they are generally used throughout the Nile valley.

A good deal of cotton is being grown throughout the Sudan nowadays and there is a whole street in Omdurman devoted to the manufacture and sale of the native product. This market at Omdurman serves a large district beyond the city, and consists of many little sheds covered with mats facing a dirt road. It is situated not far from the centre of the city, and there are several thousand acres of mud huts reaching out on all sides of it. Both the sheds and the streets are filled with cotton. It is brought in in bags of matting, and sold just as it is when picked from the plants. The samples are displayed in flat, round baskets, each of which holds perhaps a bushel; and when carried away it is put up in bags and not in bales. A great part of it goes to the native weavers, who turn it into cloth, using the smallest factories one can imagine.

Not far from the street where the cotton is sold I found one of these tiny factories. The establishment consisted of a half-dozen mud huts, shut off from the street by a mud wall, which, with the huts, formed a court. In the court a dozen black-skinned women were sitting on mats on the ground, ginning and spinning, while the weaving went on in the huts at the back. The gin was somewhat like a clothes wringer save that the rolls were about as big around as the ordinary candle, and the whole machine was so small that it could have fitted into a peck measure. One woman turned the machine while another put in the cotton and picked out the seeds as they failed to go through. Near the gin sat two women who were snapping the lint with bowstrings to separate the fibres, and farther over there were a half-dozen others, sitting cross-legged, and spinning the lint into yarn by hand.

I went to the mud huts at the back to look in at the weavers. They were black boys and men, who sat before rude looms on the edge of holes in the ground. The looms were so made that they could be worked with the feet, the shuttles being thrown back and forth by hand. The latter moved through the cloth with a whistling noise, which was about the only sound to be heard. The cloth turned out is very good. It is well woven and soft, and brings good prices. Its wearing qualities are better than those of the Manchester and American cottons. I asked what wages the boy weavers received, and was told ten cents a day.

A large part of the grain of the Upper Sudan comes down the Blue and White Niles to Omdurman. The grain markets are close to the river and since there is no rain here at this time of the year, there is no need for warehouses or sheds. The grain is poured out on the hard ground in great piles and left there until sold. If you will imagine several hundred little mountains of white or red sand with wooden measures of various sizes lying at their feet or stuck into their sloping sides, you may have some idea of this Central African grain market. You must add the tents of canvas or the mat shelters in which the native merchants stay while waiting for their customers, as well as a crowd of black-skinned, white-gowned men and women moving about sampling the wares and buying or selling.

The merchants watch the grain all day, and if they are forced to go away at nightfall they smooth the hills out and make cabalistic marks upon them so that they can easily tell if their property has been disturbed during their absence. The most common grains sold here are wheat, barley, and dura. The last named is ground to a flour either in hand mills or between stones moved about by bullocks or camels, and is eaten in the shape of round loaves of about the circumference of a tea plate and perhaps two inches thick. The wheat is of the macaroni variety, which grows well in these dry regions wherever irrigation is possible.

Speaking of the flour of the Sudan, I visited one of the largest milling establishments of the country during my stay in Omdurman. The owner is among the richest and most influential of the Sudanese. He is an emir, and as such is a leading citizen of the town. His mills were in a great mud-walled compound, which contained also his garden and home. The garden was irrigated by a well, and upon entering it I saw two black slave girls turning the wheels which furnished the water supply.

The mills were three in number. Each was in a mud stable-like one-story building just large enough to hold the millstones and the track for the animals which turned them. The stones were similar to the old-fashioned grinding machines of our own country. They rested one upon the other and were so made that the grain flowed from a hopper on to the top stone. The motive power for each mill was a blindfolded camel, who moved around in a circle, turning the top stone. The camels were driven by black boys, who sat on the bars of the mills and rode there as they whipped them along. The flour so ground was fine. Picking up a handful, I tasted it and found it quite good.