THE FALL OF KHARTOUM. 391 your garrison and submit to the indignity of being threatened by him. Eventually, you will have to fight him to hold your position in Egypt, which you will then do with the population round you, ready, on any reverse, to rise against you. No frontier force can keep Mahdism out of Egypt, and the Mahdi must sooner or later be smashed, or he will smash you."

The foresight of this statement would, I think, have been fully justified by the result, but for an unforeseen casualty. At the very height of the Mahdi*s success, when the British armies had retired, not .

indeed defeated, but baffled, when his authority was acknowledged over the whole territory of the Soudan, and when he was regarded by the Mahometan population of inland Africa as the chosen messenger of the one God, sent to restore the rule of Islam, he died suddenly in Omdurman of small-pox. Such, at any rate, was the reputed cause of his death. Once more fate or fortune saved us in Egypt from the consequences of our own errors.