3-074-791 - The Print Collector/Heritage Images

Sketches in the Soudan: El Obeid, the Capital of Kordofan, near which the army of Hicks Pasha was destroyed, 1883. 'The chief towns of Kordofan are El Obeid, the capital, near which the late disastrous battle was fought...The Austrian geographer and traveller, Ernst Marno, who died not long since, was in Kordofan in 1874 and 1875; and from his "Reise in der AEgyptischen AEquatorial-Provinz und in Kordofan," published at Vienna in 1878, we borrow a view of El Obeid...[The town] stands on a gradually sloping and undulating plain, but with several groups of mountains behind it southward, ten or twenty miles distant, amongst which, as we suppose, the army of Hicks Pasha was surprised by the Mahdi's overwhelming host...The houses of the native inhabitants, as they appear in this view of the town, are circular huts, thatched with reeds, and might from a distance look like tents. The town is not walled round, but is defended by a fort, and consists of five or six clusters of clay-built dwellings'. From "Illustrated London News", 1883.