Darfur by Muhammad Rauf Pasha and given the rank of bey. Surrender of Dara While administering Dara, Slatin conducted a successful campaign against one of the Darfur princes in revolt, and later, as governor of Darfur. Early in 1882 the Rizeigat tribesmen of Southern Darfur rebelled, led by Sheikh Madibbo ibn Ali, a convert to the cause of the religious leader known as the Mahdi Muhammad Ahmad. Slatin gallantly defended his province and though he fought many successful battles, he gradually lost ground. At Om Waragat he lost 8,000 of his men in the first 20 minutes of the battle and was himself wounded three times but he managed to fight his way back to Dara. Believing his troops attributed their failure in battle to the fact that he was a Christian, Slatin publicly adopted Islam in 1883 and took the Islamic name, Abd al Qadir. The Mahdists then captured el Obeid, the capital of Kordofan, severing all Slatin's links with Khartoum. When Hicks Pasha's expedition was annihilated at the Battle of Shaykan in 1883, Slatin finally surrendered to his old enemy the Mahdist Emir Madibbo, refusing to make any further sacrifice of life in a hopeless cause. When the Mahdists reached Khartoum, an attempt was made to use him to induce the commander Charles George Gordon, now Governor General of Sudan, to surrender. This failing, Slatin was placed in chains, and on the morning of 26 January 1885, an hour or two after the fall of Khartoum, Gordon's head was brought to the camp and shown to the captive. After the sudden death of the Mahdi the same year, Slatin was kept at Omdurman by his successor, the Khalifa Abdullahi, being treated alternately with savage cruelty and comparative indulgence. During his captivity, he worked as adviser and interpreter for the Khalifa, and was made to serve in his personal retinue of bodyguards. Escape from captivity At length, after over eleven years captivity, he was able to escape, with the help of Sir Reginald (then Major) Wingate of the Egyptian Intelligence Department and , in a perilous 1000 km. and three-week journey across the desert, reaching Aswan, Egypt in March 1895. In a remarkable book, Fire and Sword in the Sudan, written in the same year and issued in English and German in 1896, Slatin gave not only a personal narrative of fighting and serving the dervishes but a comprehensive