South from Khartoum

In the 1880's, a self-styled Moslem messiah known as the Mahdi led his revolutionary forces against the British rule in Africa, devastating one outpost after another. The last of Gernal "Chinese" Gordon's lieutenants to hold out against the Mahdist forces was a gentle, scholarly German Jew, who preferred cataloging flowers and treating the sick to leading troops to battle. Emin Pasha, born Eduard Carl Oscar Theodore Schnitzer, was a man of romance and mystery. As a doctor, he brought medicine to the backward natives; as a military, he threw his energies into halting the African slave trade. News that filtered back to London of the extent of the Mahdist rebellion, and of its murderous fury, was horrifying. Almost single-handedly, cut off from all communication with the rest of the world, Emin Pasha staged a last-ditch defense at Walderai against the advancing, fanatical hordes.