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Southward, up the Nile valley and across grim deserts, lies Khartoum, the capital of the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan, only four days from Cairo by rail. This is a very tempting theatre for missionary enterprise, which is, however, held in check by the authorities, who decline to have their Sudan spiritually exploited and materially disturbed by futile efforts to evangelise the country.
They come also from the heart of the Sahara, where savage and warlike nomad tribes still to this day maintain their freedom against foreign interference. In Timbuktu meet Arabs and negroes, Mohammedans and heathens from the deserts and fruitful lands of the Sahara and Sudan. Timbuktu stands on the threshold of the great wastes, and at the same time on the third in rank of the rivers of Africa.
Cashiered in 1912, he served Enver Pasha in Tripoli, became an officer of Abdul Hamid's bodyguard, and afterwards a Major of the Baghdad Gendarmerie. Long before November, 1914, he had busily plotted for a rising in Egypt and the diffusion of German propaganda all over the Sudan.
Just as Latin Rome gave the imperial idea to the Nordic races, so Islam brought this idea to the Sudan. In the consequent attempts at imperialism in the western Sudan there arose the largest of the African empires.
Then the belated funeral service is impressively conducted by four clergymen of different Christian denominations, the Sudanese band plays a hymn which Gordon loved, and lastly Kitchener is saluted with the greatest enthusiasm by the officers and men under his command. Now all is changed in the Sudan. A railway runs from the Nile delta up to Khartum, and another connects Berber with the Red Sea.
Clavier Pain, a French adventurer, who had taken part in the Commune, and who was now wandering, for reasons which have never been discovered, in the wastes of the Sudan, was seized by the Arabs, made prisoner, and hurried from camp to camp. He was attacked by fever; but mercy was not among the virtues of the savage soldiers who held him in their power.
Gordon's last great adventure, like his first, was occasioned by a religious revolt. At the very moment when, apparently forever, he was shaking the dust of Egypt from his feet, Mahommed Ahmed was starting upon his extraordinary career in the Sudan. The time was propitious for revolutions. The effete Egyptian Empire was hovering upon the verge of collapse.
It is not worth while belonging to a big nation unless the big nation is willing when the necessity arises to undertake a big task. I feel about you in the Sudan just as I felt about us in Panama. When we acquired the right to build the Panama Canal, and entered on the task, there were worthy people who came to me and said they wondered whether it would pay.
It is the religion of possession and has been connected by some with Asiatic influences. From without have come two great religious influences, Islam and Christianity. Islam came by conquest, trade, and proselytism. As a conqueror it reached Egypt in the seventh century and had by the end of the fourteenth century firm footing in the Egyptian Sudan.
From a campaign in the Sudan conducted by an English army they were altogether averse.
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