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These men are quiet enough now that they have learnt the British power, but not so long ago they were inflamed with fanatical hatred. You have heard of the dervishes who were killed in thousands at Omdurman, outside Khartoum, in the great battle at which Lord Kitchener won his title when he freed the Soudan from the power of the Mahdi?
The gift of prophecy could scarcely have been demonstrated in a more remarkable degree, yet the Egyptian Government and everybody else went on acting as if there was no danger in the Soudan, and treated it like a thoroughly conquered province inhabited by a satisfied, or at least a thoroughly subjected population. From this dream there was to be a rude and startling awakening.
Antiquity of Ghadames, and Account of it by Leo Africanus. THE 23rd, 24th, and 25th, employed in writing letters. On one of these days the Rais called me to him and asked, "Whether I really intended to go to Soudan, as the people had reported to him?" I told him Yes, and that I was already making preparations.
Sympathy had given him patience and the power to understand, so that during these three years of campaign he had left far quicker and far abler men behind him, in his knowledge of the sorely harassed tribes of the eastern Soudan.
The bombarding of Alexandria, the shameful repression of the national movement in Egypt, the wholesale and useless slaughter in the Soudan, the waste of English lives and English money, the new burden of debt and of responsibility now assumed by the Government, all these are the results of the fatal purchase of shares in the Suez Canal by Mr.
He gave me a picturesque description of the German method of advance. "It is the scientific development of the wild, fanatic, life-regardless, condensed rush of the Soudan dervishes," he said. "The Germans mass together all their big field guns.
"Keep it safely for the present," said the sheikh, after smoking some time in thoughtful deliberation; "we shall find a method of transmitting it. Great events will occur soon. The authority of the Mahdi being established in the Soudan, we shall sweep Egypt like the simoom, and Cairo and Alexandria once in our hands, we shall find no difficulty in communicating with Europe.
"Bear in your mind that your evil deeds throughout the Soudan, particularly your murdering a great number of the Mohammedans without cause or excuse, besides oppression and tyranny, necessitated the advance of my troops for the destruction of your throne, in order to save the country from your devilish doings and iniquity.
There can be no question that Zebehr was a most able man, a born ruler and leader of men. He was an inveterate enemy of Gordon's, and at the meeting which took place between Gordon and Zebehr at Cairo, when the former was en route to Khartoum, lookers-on considered that on no account ought these two men ever to be in the Soudan together.
How would the cheek of Walter Scott, or of Leyden, have blushed at the names of Majuba, The Soudan, Maiwand, and many others that recall political cowardice or military incapacity! Only he who told how The stubborn spearmen still made good Their dark impenetrable wood could have fitly rhymed a score of feats of arms in which, as at M'Neill's Zareeba and at Abu Klea,
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