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The responsible Egyptian Ministers made several suggestions for dealing with the situation, but they one and all deprecated ceding territory to the Mahdi, as it would further alienate the tribes still loyal or wavering and create graver trouble in the future.
They'll be howling for an expedition. ... It is no laughing matter; THAT ABOMINABLE MAHDI! Why on earth does he not guard his roads better? WHAT IS to be done? Several times in his bitterness he repeats the suggestion that the authorities at home were secretly hoping that the fall of Khartoum would relieve them of their difficulties.
In the middle of the month of June, scarcely five months after the completion of his victorious campaigns, the Mahdi fell sick. For a few days he did not appear at the mosque. The people were filled with alarm. They were reassured by remembering the prophecy that their liberator should not perish till he had conquered the earth. Mohammed, however, grew worse.
Their contempt for the enemy was supreme. They did not even trouble themselves to post sentries by night, but slept calmly inside a slender thorn fence, unwatched save by their tireless foes. And so it came to pass that in the half-light of the early morning of the 7th of June the Mahdi, his ragged Khalifas, and his almost naked army rushed upon them, and slew them to a man.
They were the divinities of Arabia and of the Mamelukes who wished their troopers to believe that the Mahdi had the power of preventing them from dying in battle. They gave out that he was an angel sent down to wage war on Napoleon, and to get back Solomon's seal, part of their paraphernalia which they pretended our general had stolen.
The rights of the Sultan and the Khedive alone continue to exist over the regions of the Soudan and of Equatorial Africa." That is to say, after the Mahdi, who was the de facto ruler, the authority over the whole basin of the Upper Nile reverted to the Khedive and the Sultan as his suzerain, which is exactly the position taken up by Lord Salisbury in his despatch of September 9, 1898.
On this ground, and in order to remove the danger of a return of barbarism, which was threatened by frequent Mahdist attacks, and finally in order to rescue captives who were enduring terrible sufferings in the hands of the Mahdi, it appeared that the reconquest of the Soudan must be undertaken as the inevitable sequel to the reorganisation of Egypt.
They will be plundered to the skin, and even then their lives may not be spared. Whatever you may decide about evacuation, you cannot evacuate, because your army cannot be moved. You must either surrender absolutely to the Mahdi or defend Khartoum at all hazards. The latter is the only course which ought to be entertained. There is no serious difficulty about it.
"Think no more of that," he said, and then he stopped, as if the word that he had been about to speak had halted on his tongue. "It is hard to leave her," said Israel, "for she is alone; and who will protect her when I am gone?" "God lives," said the Mahdi, "and He is Father to the fatherless."
They had no policy at all, but they had one supreme wish, viz. to cut off the Soudan from Egypt; and if the Mahdi had only known their wishes and pressed on, and treated the Khartoum force as he had treated that under Hicks, there would have been no garrisons to rescue, and that British Government would have done nothing.
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