Britain is ruled by women who experience invasion and natural disasters. Men eventually figure out a plan to regain power to replace the government.
By : Douglas Morey Ford (1851 - 1916)
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Prologue
Chapter I
The Lost Leader
Wilson Renshaw, the most brilliant member of the House of Commons, was on the verge of a complete breakdown at the end of the memorable Session of 1930, a session in which the marshalled forces of Socialism, allied with the insurgent women of England, had almost, but not quite, swept the board.
The Vacation of that year had brought a truce in the fiercest Parliamentary campaign known to modern times, and Renshaw, under the peremptory advice of medical specialists, left England for a prolonged holiday.
He went to Egypt, recruited his health at Cairo, and then, in pursuance of a long-cherished wish, set out by a circuitous route for Khartum. With the exception of Jerusalem, the Nubian capital was regarded by the young English statesman as the most sacred spot on earth, sanctified, as it was, by the blood of General Gordon, a Christian soldier, who, to the indelible disgrace of the political clique then in power, had been left unsupported in the midst of his blood-thirsty enemies, until it was too late to rescue him.
That for which Gordon had paved the way; that which Kitchener and Macdonald had gallantly achieved, in these latter days political sentimentalists, Englishmen of parochial mind, had gradually undone. Egypt, brought to a pitch of high prosperity under the civil administration of Lord Cromer, had been gradually allowed to lapse back into native hands. There had been no absolute evacuation at the date of Renshaw's arrival in the country, but the British garrison had been reduced to insignificant proportions.
But Renshaw did not come back! He had vanished from the ken of civilization—swallowed up as effectually in the Nubian desert as when the earth had opened and swallowed up Dathan and covered the congregation of Abiram. The history of Egypt and the Soudan, written in blood at the period in question, only accorded with that written in ink, in advance of the event, by those who in the first decade of the twentieth century foresaw the outcome of Little Englandism all the world over. The native movement—the strength of which the dominant party in Parliament had chosen to ignore—manifested itself in scenes of sudden and overwhelming violence, while at the same time the Holy War, preached by a Mahdi in whose existence great numbers of people had refused to believe, claimed as sacrificial victims nearly every white-skinned man throughout the length and breadth of the Soudan.
The caravan with which Renshaw was travelling fell into the hands of the Mahdi's adherents, betrayed by a treacherous guide, who then spread the news—anticipating what he had every reason to believe would really happen—of the death of The White Kaffir, as a consequence of the resistance he had offered to a band of "True Believers." The news was received in England with grief and lamentation by those who esteemed Renshaw, appreciated his talents, and knew how essential were his services if the aims of the Socialist-Labour Leader, Nicholas Jardine, and his party were to be defeated. But the public in general saw in the disappearance of the rising statesman the almost inevitable result of a rash enterprise. It came to be regarded only as an incidental episode in the wholesale upheaval of which India, Egypt, and other lands once dominated by the British sceptre soon became the scene.
All this had happened ten years and more before the critical events of 1940. From time to time during that period little-credited reports reached England concerning a certain white prisoner in the hands of the Mahdi, who was believed by some to be none other than Renshaw, the missing man. But, except with a few, these rumours carried little weight. It was not the first time that tales of that sort had reached home after the disappearance of well-known men in remote regions of the Dark Continent. Many, recalling the explorations of Dr. Livingstone, and Stanley's expedition for the rescue of Emin Pasha, said that when Renshaw was found and brought home they would believe that he was alive—and not before.
Meanwhile, in England, Nicholas Jardine carried everything before him. The Constitutional Party, leaderless and disorganized, seemed to sink into helpless apathy, and right and left the rapid shrinkage of the British Empire bore witness to the ruinous success of new and revolutionary parties in the State. Sometimes, in the House of Commons, old followers of the Labour Leader's missing rival asked questions, which, for the moment, attracted marked attention and, in some minds, roused most sinister suspicions. Had the President received any information that tended to confirm the rumour that Mr. Renshaw was still living and undergoing the tortures of a barbarous imprisonment? Was it a fact that, after a specified date, the Government, or any members of it, had been notified, not only that Mr. Renshaw was alive, but that on payment of a ransom he might be restored to his country? Had any confidential information been received from certain oriental visitors who, from time to time, had come to this country? Was it, or was it not, a fact that certain periodical payments of large amount had been made out of secret service funds in relation to Mr. Renshaw and his alleged imprisonment?
These searching questions were evaded in the usual Parliamentary manner, and it was observed that never was President Jardine—such was his official title as chief of the new Council of State—so black and taciturn as when this suggestive topic was from time to time revived in Parliament.
Chapter II.
A Prisoner of the Mahdi
Through all those dreadful years Wilson Renshaw lived—lived day and night the tortured life of a white man at the mercy of the black. Year after year the iron entered his soul, even as the Mahdi's fetters ate into his swollen and bleeding limbs.
There were others who suffered with him in the barbaric prison-house. What he endured was no less, no more, than they were made to bear. Happy indeed were those whom death released from misery and anguish that tongue could never tell, nor pen describe. Hell itself, as pictured by maddest brain of the most fiendish fanatic, could not have shown greater resources in the way of physical and mental torture. The Black Hole of Calcutta lacked many of the special horrors of the inner den in which the prophet's prisoners were herded during all the awful hours of night. The bloodstained walls of the Tower of London, if walls could speak, whispering of the rack, the thumbscrew, and the boot, might tell indeed of sharper anguish, sooner over. The secret history of the Spanish Inquisition, if published, would reveal not less ingenuity—perhaps greater, in the refined subtleties of cruelty. But the prison at Khartum excelled them all at least in one respect—the prolongation of the agony inflicted.
Not for weeks or months, but for years, if life endured, the prisoner had to suffer. Wearing three sets of shackles, with an iron ring round his neck, to which was attached a heavy chain, Renshaw—the White Kaffir—the man of culture and social ease in London, but here the reviled unbeliever, when night came was thrust into a stone-walled room measuring some thirty feet each way. A large pillar, supporting the roof, reduced the space available. Two prisoners, in chains, were dying of smallpox in a corner; some thirty others, suffering from various diseases, lay about the floor, which reeked with filth and swarmed with vermin. A compound stench, sickening and over-powering, assailed the nostrils, and every moment this increased as more prisoners, and yet more, were driven in for the night. The groans of the sick, the screams of the mad, the curses of others as they fought fiercely for places against one or another of the walls, blended in awful tumult as the door was closed upon the darkness within. Yet again and again that door was opened, and more prisoners were crowded in; until, at last, they fought and bit and raved even for standing room.
Night after night, for nearly four years, Renshaw, the man of delicate fibre and refined training, the son of Western civilization, lived through such scenes as these, amid incidental horrors of bestiality that cannot be set down. When the uproar in the prison attained exceptional violence, the guards threw back the doors, and lashed with their hide-whips at the heads and faces of the nearest prisoners, and every time that this occurred some of them, struggling to move back, fell to the ground, and were trampled under foot.
Renshaw was the only white prisoner among the Soudanese and Egyptians who thus endured the tender mercies of the Prophet—the Prophet for whom, it was said, the Angels had fought and would fight again, until every follower of the Cross accepted the Koran of Mahommed. For, like many of the greatest crimes that stain the annals of mankind, this prison discipline, in theory, was designed to benefit the souls of the captives. The White Kaffir, as an unbeliever, a dog and an outcast, was a special object of the Mahdi's solicitation. Only let him believe and his fetters should be struck off, or, at least, some of them. He had but to cry aloud in fervent faith, "There is but one God, and Mahommed is his Prophet!"
But it was a cry that never passed the lips of Wilson Renshaw. The lash was tried again and again. Fifteen to twenty lashes at first; then a hundred; then a hundred and fifty. But still the bleeding lips in which the white man's teeth were biting in his anguish would not blaspheme. "Will you not cry out?" the gaoler asked. "Dog of a Christian, are thy head and heart of stone?" No answer; and again and yet again the lash descended.
If only death would come, kind death to end this pain of mutilated flesh; this still sharper pain of degradation and humiliation! But death came not. Courage, indomitable pride of race, a godlike quality of patience, armed the White Kaffir to endure the slings and arrows of his dreadful fate. Death he would welcome with a sigh of gladness, but these barbarians should never, never break his spirit.
At last the rigour of his sufferings was abated. Out of the mists of what seemed an interminable period of delirium, he awoke to a change of his treatment that caused him much surprise. No longer was he to be half starved. At night he was allowed to sleep alone in a rough, dark hut in a corner of the prison compound. Each day he was permitted, though still fettered, to go down to the river, on the banks of which the prison was placed, and wash in the waters of the Nile. From all of these changes it became apparent that his life, and not his death, was now desired. The motive for the change he had yet to realize. A whisper here and there, a chance word from his gaolers, with sundry indications, fugitive and various, at length convinced him that this amelioration of his fate could have but one sinister explanation, and one inspiring motive. If not the Mahdi himself, then some of the more covetous of his leading followers must be drawing payment from some mysterious source, a subsidy for holding him secure, here under the burning African sun, remote and cut off from all chance of rescue or escape.
Yet escapes were planned, for even among these barbarous people there were a few who felt compassion for the hapless condition of the White Kaffir; and when it began to be rumoured that he was a man of high consideration in his native country, others, moved by cupidity and the prospect of a great reward, found means of letting Renshaw know that, on conditions, they were willing to secure him at least a chance of freedom. But every plan fell through. The Mahdi's spies were everywhere, and those who fell under suspicion of seeking to aid Renshaw to break free from his captivity received a punishment so terrible that he shrank from listening to any further offer of assistance.
Presently his condition underwent yet further betterment. He became a prisoner at large—though still fettered and still closely watched. Employment he had none, save the performance of a few menial offices. Books he had none, save Al-Koran, the volume containing the religious, social, commercial, military, and legal code of Islam. But here, in the heart of this dreadful land, among the dark people of the Dark Continent, he now learned to look upon the book of life itself from a new and startling standpoint. Before him was unfolded a new and terrible chapter of history in the making, a chapter which revealed the slow marshalling of millions of the dark-skinned races, eager to wrest dominion and supremacy from the white-skinned masters of the world.
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