THE RISING OF THE MAHDI. 319 they were driven away with stones, and returned penniless. As soon as the news of this rising reached Cairo, a regiment was sent to surround the village, with orders to allow nobody to pass their lines, to shoot down every living thing, man, woman, child, and animal, and to sow the lands of the villages with salt, so that they might remain barren for ever, as a warning to future generations. The orders were, it is said, carried out to the letter. Nothing more was ever heard in this neighbourhood of any open resistance to the authority of the Government; and the insurrection died stillborn.

However contrary to European ideas this stamping out of the Keneh Mahdi may appear to us, it is certain that, if a similar process could have been resorted to in the case of the Mahdi of the Soudan. Mahomet Achmed of Dongola, humanity would have been the gainer. A man of humble origin, a carpenter by trade, he gradually got into relations with the Fakirs, or holy men of the Soudan, studied the Koran at Fakir schools, was admitted into the order of Fakirs, and finally acquired great local repute by dwelling in a cave, where he used to spend hours calling upon Allah by his hundred attributes, and by exhorting all who came within his reach to revert to the sacred law contained in the Koran. Later on he proclaimed that he himself was the Mahdi chosen by Allah to reform and restore Islam, and soon obtained a considerable following. He took up his quarters on an island in the White Nile, not far from Fashoda,