CHAPTER XXXIV THE SOUDAN CLOSED TO THE WESTERN WORLD « Ahmed Baba records that the Sultan Muley Zidan, son and successor to Muley Hamed, told him at a later period that, from the time of Pasha Djouder to that of Pasha Suleiman, his father, Muley Hamed, had sent in different army corps 23,000 of his best soldiers into the Soudan, and added : " All this was a pure loss. The whole of the men perished in the Soudan, with the exception of 500 who returned to Morocco and died in that town." As a matter of fact, the Sultan was illinformed. His armies, as we have seen, had not perished in the Soudan, but had simply cut themselves off from their allegiance, and had formed in the southern countries an independent system of military brigandage of which the remains exist to the present day.

But for all practical purposes the Soudan itself was from this date lost to the world. Its military tyrants had their own reasons for breaking off relations with Morocco. Morocco in turn was cut off by the religious sentiment of the Western world from all connection with Southern Europe, and the political rivalry of the Turks deprived her at the same time of the position which she might otherwise have occupied upon the Barbary coast. The Saracens, whose rule had once extended from the borders of China to the western coast of Spain, had become an outcast race, the seat of whose dwindling monarchy was to be looked for, if anywhere, in Morocco, and whose representatives, wandering at hazard through the desert wastes of Africa and Arabia, hardly knew to which of the cardinal points to set their 315