in all its details and merely enacted as a pageant on the Berlin stage.

forms

League.

[In 1879, Davitt forms the Irish Land Davitt League; Chili and Peru go to war over the Irish Land nitrate deposits; Peru's navy is ruined and her chief ports captured. The British go to war with the Zulus, who are successful at first, but crushed at Ulundi. Belgium sends Stanley to found the Congo Free State. The British envoy being murdered, Afghanistan is again invaded and the capital captured. In 1880, Montenegro acquires Dulcigno. In Afghanistan, the British are defeated at Maiwand, but Roberts makes a successful march to Candahar. The Boer War breaks out. Cologne Cathedral, begun in the Thirteenth Century, is finally completed. In 1881, the Czar Alexander II. is murdered. Turkey is forced to cede most of Thessaly and the command of the Gulf of Arta to Greece. President Gar- President field is murdered. The Boers defeat the British and the Transvaal recovers self-government. The French gain control of Tunis. A Dongola enthusiast proclaims himself the Mahdi and raises the Sudan against the Khedive. The Russians take the Turcoman fastness of Geok-Tepe and a general massacre follows. The Revised Version of the New Testament is brought out. In England, the Married Woman's Property Act is passed.]

Garfield

murdered.

THE RISE OF MAHDISM

(A.D. 1881)

G. W. STEEVENS

N the year 1881, before we came to Egypt

IN

at all, there had arisen a religious teacher,

a native of Dongola, named Mohammed Ahmed. The Sudan is the home of fanaticism: it has always been called "the Land of Mohammed the Dervishes," and no rising saint was more

Ahmed.

ascetic than the young Dongolawi. He was a disciple of a holy man named Mohammed Sherif, and one day the master gave a feast at which there was dancing and singing. Such frivolity, said Mohammed Ahmed, was displeasing to Allah; whereat the Sherif was angry, cursed him, and cast him out. The disciple sprinkled ashes on his head, put a yoke on his neck, and fell at his master's feet, imploring forgiveness. Again Mohammed Sherif cursed him and cast him out.

Angered now himself, Mohammed Ahmed joined a new teacher and became a straiter ascetic than ever. The fame of his sanctity spread, and adherents flocked to him. saw that the people of the Sudan, smarting under extortion and oppression, could but too

He

His

easily be roused against the Egyptian Government: he risked all, and proclaimed himself El Mahdi el Muntazer, the Expected Guide, the Mussulman Messiah. The Gov-influence. ernor-General at Khartum sent two companies to arrest him: the Mahdi's followers fell on them unawares and destroyed them. More troops were sent; the Mahdists destroyed them: next came a small army, and again the Mahdists destroyed it. The barbarous tribesmen flocked to the Mahdi's standard, and in September, 1882, he laid siege to El Obeid, the chief city of Kordofan. His assault was beaten back with great slaughter, but after five months' siege the town surrendered; sack and massacre taught doubters what they had to expect.

The Sudan doubted no longer: of a truth this was the Mahdi. Hicks Pasha's army came down from the North only to swell the Mahdi's triumph to immensity. Unorganized, unwieldy, afraid, the Egyptians crawled on toward El Obeid, harassed by an enemy they never saw. They saw them at last on November 4, 1883, at Shekan: the fight lasted The masa minute, and the massacre spared only hun-Sha dreds out of ten thousand. The rest you know-Gordon's mission, the loss of Berber, the siege of Khartum, the massacre of Baker's levies at El Teb, Graham's expedition to Suakim, and the hard-fought fights of the second Teb and Tamai, Wolseley's expedition up the

at

The third

act.

Nile, with Abu Klea and the Gubar and Kirbekan, the second Suakim campaign and M'Neill's zariba. Everybody knows these stories, so gallant, so futile. I remember thirteen and fourteen years ago being enormously proud and joyful about Tamai and Abu Klea. I was very young. Read over the tale again now the faltering and the folly and the failure-and you will feel that if Egypt has Baker's Teb and Hicks's ruin to wipe out, England was not so very far from suffering precisely the same humiliations. And in the end we failed, with what loss we still remember, and gave the Sudan away. The second act is not a merry one.

The third was less tragic, but it was perhaps even harder to play. We pass by a mudwalled quadrangle, which was once the artillery barracks; through the gateway you look across sand to the mud ramparts of Halfa. That is the stamp of the days of reorganization, of retrenchment, of difficulties and discouragements, and unconquerable, undisappointed work. Those were the days when the Egyptian army was in the making, when Halfa was the frontier fortress. There are old barracks all over it, where the young fighting force of Egypt used to sleep half awake. The brown flanks of those hills beyond the rifle-range, just a couple of miles or so desertward, have seen Dervishes stealing up in broad day and insolently slashing and stabbing in

the main streets of the bazaar. Yet this time was not all unavenged insult: the long years between 1885 and 1896 saw Egypt defended and its assailants smashed to pieces. Little by little Egypt-British Egypt now-gained strength and new resolution.

The first

Egyptian

Four battles mark the stages from weakness and abandonment to confidence and the resolution to reconquer. At Ginnis, on the last Angloday but one of 1885, came the first Anglo- victory. Egyptian strategical victory. The Mahdists had been tactically beaten before-well beaten; but the result had always been that we fell back and they came on. After Ginnis, fought

by the British army of occupation, aided by a small number of the new Egyptian army, we stood firm, and the Dervishes were washed back. There were men of the Cameron Highlanders, on the Atbara, who had fought in that battle: it was not perhaps a very great one, but it was the first time the enemy had been brought to a standstill. He retired behind the Third Cataract.

counter

ad- ralds.

Then followed three years of raid and Raids and counter-raid. Chermside cut up their vance-guard at Sarras; they captured the fort of Khor Musa, and Machell Bey of the 13th Sudanese drove them out within twelve hours. On the Suakim side the present Sirdar made head against Osman Digna with what irregulars and friendlies he could get together. Then in 1888 Osman waxed insolent and threw