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In vain did Gordon seek to keep communications open. All that he could do was to hold stoutly to that last bulwark of civilisation. There were still some grounds for hope. The Mahdi remained in Kordofan, want of food preventing his march northwards in force. Against his half-armed fanatics the city opposed a strong barrier.
The Bāb, too, had probably a presentiment of his end; this was why he was so eager to avoid a continuance of the great misunderstanding. He was indeed the Twelfth Imâm, who had returned to the world of men for a short time. But he was not a Mahdi of the Islamic type. In this way he kept himself in touch with those who could not see him in the flesh.
The fine collection of natural curiosities, illustrating the descent of man, was reserved for the last, and Professor Thunder proudly arrayed his company before the cages containing the tiny apes, the middling-sized gibbons, the baboon, Ammonia, the gorilla, and Mahdi, the man-monkey, or Missing Link. The young ladies were quite enthusiastic in their admiration.
He was attended by soldiers, who stood in his presence with drawn swords, and he had all the power of a king. Because he was Mahdi, his followers all had to obey him. And as he was Mahdi, he himself did exactly as he pleased, and what he liked to do was all that was wicked and cruel.
In its name we take ten years of a thief's life minute by minute in the slow misery and degradation of modern reformed imprisonment with as little remorse as Laud and his Star Chamber clipped the ears of Bastwick and Burton. We dug up and mutilated the remains of the Mahdi the other day exactly as we dug up and mutilated the remains of Cromwell two centuries ago.
The Egyptian governor-general summoned him to Khartoum to answer for his proceedings, but the mahdi answered that he was master of the country and obeyed no one. The troops despatched against him he always defeated, and when a new governor-general and a fresh army gave him battle they were utterly destroyed.
That Gordon held that the authors of the Arabi rising and of the Mahdist movement were the same in sympathy, if not in person, cannot be doubted, and in February 1882, when the Mahdi had scarcely begun his career, he wrote: "If they send the Black regiment to the Soudan to quell the revolt, they will inoculate all the troops up there, and the Soudan will revolt against Cairo, whom they all hate."
The orthodox Mahdi differs from that of the Shi'ah in many ways. He is not an imam returning after centuries of disappearance, but a descendant of Mohammed, coming into the world in the ordinary way to fulfill the ideal of the Khalifate.
I stopped at the old Alestock mill where Ben's Run goes trickling into the Stone Coal, climbed down from El Mahdi and washed my face in the water, and then passed the rein under my arm and sat down in the road to await the arrival of my companions.
Everywhere the villages were almost entirely deserted and the fields lay waste; the blighting influence of the Mahdi seemed to weigh upon the whole country. The few natives that remained fled in fear at the sight of the strangers, and the old people they met with in the villages were crushed with grief and despondency.
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