Sudan Anglo-Egyptian 27 ANNEXATION BY EGYPT of Gordon's lieutenants, the German doctor Emin, governed the Equatorial Province up to up to Lake Albert, and the Austrian soldier Slatin was ap pointed to Kordofan. On the east Ismail's posses sions, won largely by purchase and diplomacy, included Suakin, Massawa, and the coastal region southward to beyond Berbera . Bogos and Harrar were wrenched from Abyssinia in 1872-5 ; but King John of Abyssinia inflicted severe defeats on Ismail's worthless troops at Gudda -Guddi in 1875 and Gura in 1876 ; and these dis tricts were ceded back to Abyssinia a few years later in return for Abyssinian help against the Dervishes. When Ismail was deposed in 1879 , his vast Sudanese possessions were in a state of indescribable misery and bankruptcy, and the whole of the Egyptian administra tion of the land was rotten to the core. At the root of the whole evil was the slave trade , which would revive to-morrow if the English share in the administration of the Sudan was surrendered and if the French lost control of Wadai .

The accession of Tewfik (June 1879) soon caused the resignation of Gordon , who left the Sudan in Decem ber 1879. In the following year Gessi also resigned. The old order of things returnedunchecked and even stimulated by Rauf Pasha at Khartum ( Governor 1880-81 ) . Gordon's withdrawal destroyed the last hope of peace and reform in the Sudan .

1 (4 ) The Mahdia and the Reconquest ( 1881-99 ) In August 1881 Mohammed Ahmed , an ascetic , . fiki of the despised Berberine race of Dongola dis trict , aged about 40 , a man inspired by genuine religious enthusiasm and faith in his own divine call for the purification of Islam , a seer of visions, yet of the shrewdest intelligence, proclaimed a holy war against all infidels, “ Turks , ” and the Egyptian oppres sors of the country. He appropriatedthe traditional 1 The evidence of Lord Cromer and of Gordon's reports and diaries is decisive .

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