There was every reason to fear a speedy collapse.  In the years 1874-76 the Province of the White Nile had known the benefits of just and tactful rule under that born leader of men, Colonel Gordon; and in the three following years, as Governor-General of the Sudan, he gained greater powers, which he felt to be needful for the suppression of the slave-trade and other evils.  Ill-health and underhand opposition of various kinds caused him to resign his post in 1879.  Then, to the disgust of all, the Khedive named as his successor Rauf Pasha, whom Gordon had recently dismissed for maladministration of the Province of Harrar, on the borders of Abyssinia[378].  Thus the Sudan, after experiencing the benefits of a just and able government, reeled back into the bad old condition, at the time when the Mahdi was becoming a power in the land.  No help was forthcoming from Egypt in the summer of 1882, and the Mahdi’s revolt rapidly made headway even despite several checks from the Egyptian troops.

[Footnote 378:  See Gordon’s letter of April 1880, quoted in the Introduction to The Journals of Major-General C.G.  Gordon at Khartum (1885), p. xvii.]

Possibly, if Mr. Gladstone and his colleagues had decided to crush it in that autumn, the task might have been easy.  But, far from doing so, they sought to dissuade the Khedive from attempting to hold the most disturbed districts, those of Kordofan and Darfur, beyond Khartum.  This might have been the best course, if the evacuation could have been followed at once and without risk of disaster at the hands of the fanatics.  But Tewfik willed otherwise.  Against the advice of Lord Dufferin, he sought to reconquer the Sudan, and that, too, by wholly insufficient forces.  The result was a series of disasters, culminating in the extermination of Hicks Pasha’s Egyptian force by the Mahdi’s followers near El Obeid, the capital of Kordofan (November 5, 1883).

The details of the disaster are not fully known.  Hicks Pasha was appointed, on August 20, 1883, by the Khedive to command the expedition into that province.  He set out from Omdurman on September 9, with 10,000 men, 4 Krupp guns and 16 light guns, 500 horses and 5500 camels.  His last despatch, dated October 3, showed that the force had been greatly weakened by want of water and provisions, and most of all by the spell cast on the troops by the Mahdi’s claim to invincibility.  Nevertheless, Hicks checked the rebels in two or three encounters, but, according to the tale of one of the few survivors, a camel-driver, the force finally succumbed to a fierce charge on the Egyptian square at the close of an exhausting march, prolonged by the treachery of native guides.  Nearly the whole force was put to the sword.  Hicks Pasha perished, along with five British and four German officers, and many Egyptians of note.  The adventurous newspaper correspondents, O’Donovan and Vizetelly, also met their doom (November 5, 1883)[379].