154 EGYPT AND THE SOUDAN.

instead of rapidly using efforts to open up the way of escape, persistently shut him up in Khartum, and left Berber, Shendy, and Kassala hopelessly beleaguered, to be finally (as far as Berber and Shendy were concerned) overwhelmed by the savage hordes who slaughtered numbers of the inhabitants and closed the way of escape for those who had been waiting for a British, Indian, Turkish, or Anglo-Egyptian force to clear the route from Suakim, or to advance by the Nile from Assouan and Wady Haifa.

Gordon himself had doubtless been greatly mistaken; but having consented to be parties to his expedition (the initial error), the mistake of the British government was to have so longrefused their aid to carry out the evacuation of the provinces to which he had been sent, and to leave him to continue what became a protracted struggle against fatal odds. To have taken active proceedings at first would have been less opposed to their professedly hard-and-fast policy, than the extensive but abortive expedition which they afterwards caused to be organized when the Mahdi's savage followers swarmed around the destitute city, and deferred their murderous work only till they were sure of the approach of the British forces which had threaded the river and spanned the desert at a cost of life and money that made the original profession of non-intervention only a grim and bitter jest.

To go back for a few weeks in our narrative — on the- 12th of February, 1884, Gordon had telegraphed, announcing that he had formed a committee of defence with Hassan Kalifa Pasha, who accepted his assumption of supreme, power in the Soudan; and he then said, that he hoped to conciliate the whole province of Berber under his presidency, that the question of getting out the garrison and families was so interlaced with the preservation of well-to-do people of the country as to be for the time inseparable, and any precipitate action separating these interests would throwall well-disposed people into the ranks of the enemy and would fail in its effects. Therefore he trusted that patience would be shown, and that there would be no anxiety about the issue. This request for patience, however, was soon changed by the necessities