British howitzers on the bank of the Nile opened fire on a tomb at half past one in the afternoon. It held the Mahdi, the Sudanese religious leader whose followers had taken Khartoum and killed Gen. Charles Gordon in 1885, months before the Mahdi himself died. To his followers it was a shrine, and its dome rose above the mud houses of Omdurman. A twenty-three-year-old cavalry officer named Winston Churchill watched the third shell hit and wrote of "a prodigious cloud of red dust, in which the whole tomb disappeared." The man giving the orders was Gen. Herbert Kitchener, forty-eight years old and six feet two, with a cast in one eye that made people feel he was looking straight through them. He had pushed a railway across the desert to reach this city. The next morning, September 2, 1898, the Mahdist army attacked his lines on the plain north of Omdurman. When it was over, about 12,000 of them lay dead, against 48 of Kitchener's men. Then he turned to the tomb. Kitchener feared it would become a rallying point for the Mahdi's followers, so he had it blown up. The Mahdi's body was dug up and beheaded, and the rest was thrown into the Nile. Churchill wrote that the head was carried off in a kerosene tin as a trophy. In London, Queen Victoria asked whether it had really been necessary. The skull was said to have been buried quietly at Wadi Halfa.