124 EGYPT AND THE SOUDAN.

of Gordon, that cavalry should be pushed towards Berber. The duty would have been a difficult one, no doubt. Any force sent to perform it would have had to contend with hardships from climate, and probably with repeated and sudden attacks from the Arabs; but the tribes under Osman Digma had been driven away; the difficulties were not insuperable, and in the result the refusal promptly to follow up the success achieved by General Graham, and to send a sufficient expedition to open the road to Berber, probably led to the subsequent necessity for the far more difficult, costly, and futile expedition for the rescue of Gordon.

It is not easy to compute the method by which the government arrived at the conclusion that they were precluded from employing British troops to clear the route to Berber, though they regarded it as a clear and obvious duty, not only to hold Suakim, but to send forth a sufficient force to drive away the hostile tribes who would have invested it. Mr. Gladstone distinctly recognized that it was the duty of the government to employ the troops which protected Suakim to make war upon the tribes which endeavoured to hold the adjacent country, and that to defeat them and drive them to a distance where they would not be dangerous to the territory was a part of the reason for our occupying the place; but the government appeared to think all duties should be confined to this portion of the Soudan. One can scarcely wonder that Gordon could not perceive the logic employed in arriving at such a conclusion, and that he supposed the troops employed to relieve the Soudan provinces on the borders of the Red Sea might, without any violent inconsistency, continue their operations by opening the regular communications between that part of the country and Berber, so that the evacuation of the garrisons in the south and the relief of Khartum, where he was shut up waiting for some kind of aid, might be accomplished with the speed which was deemed so desirable. He wanted a small force sent on to Berber, and a few troops sent up the Nile to Wady Haifa, and supported by Sir Evelyn Wood's army, but he was to have neither. On the 7th of March an emissary of the Mahdi was at Shendy, between Berber and Khartum, stirring up the people there