29 THE RECONOUEST OF THE SOUDAN dramatic episodes of the day was the finding by Slatin Pasha ofHammuda's body amongthe slain. The fortune of war had brought the Austrian officer, who was so lately the Khalifa's slave, back to the Soudan as one of the victors in the Army of Reconquest,and he picked out army,and all the country to the northward was safe ; (5) the Dongola expedition had traversed successfully the last of the difficultBatn-el-Hagar country, for Ferkeh is, as we have seen, the southern gate of the stony desert, and it had now before it the more opendistrictsof the Dar Sukkot and Mahassa, where every advantage was on the side of regular troops and modern weapons.

Finally, on both sides the moral effect of this ideally complete victory for the one, this crushing defeat for the other, was enormous. It was the first time that the new Egyptian army had taken the initiative in any serious fighting in the Nile Valley. All previous Nile campaigns, since Khartoum fell, had begun with a Mahdist advance. Here the Egyptian army had both challenged the trial of strength and struck the first blow. The news of the destruction of Hammuda's army was a warning to every tribe in the Soudan that the Khalifa's power was tottering to its fall, and that to stand by the Dervishes any longer was to be on the losing sidein the struggle.

among the dead Emirs men he had known at Khartoumin the days of his captivity.

Briefly,the results of Ferkeh were that (I) in the twenty-four hours— from 5 a.m. on Sunday, June 7th, to the same hour on Monday, June 8th— more than fifty miles of the Nile Valley had been cleared of the Dervishes, and had passed into secure possession of the Anglo-Egvptian army; (2) all doubt as to the fighting value of the purely Egyptian battalions had been cleared away by their steady and brilliant conduct in the field, while the cavalry had proved their value both in the fight and the pursuit ;(3) the one fully organised army that the Dervishes possessed on theNile frontier had been utterlydestroyed;(4) Suarda, for years the starting-point of cruel raids on the Nile villages, had become the advanced post of the Egyptian THE IORTUNEl. Of WAR:SLATIN PASHA DISCOVERING THE BODY OF HIS OLD ENEMY, THE EMIR IIAMMUDA.