Gordon's last great adventure, like his first, was occasioned by
a religious revolt. At the very moment when, apparently forever,
he was shaking the dust of Egypt from his feet, Mahommed Ahmed
was starting upon his extraordinary career in the Sudan. The time
was propitious for revolutions. The effete Egyptian Empire was
hovering upon the verge of collapse. The enormous territories of
the Sudan were seething with discontent. Gordon's administration
had, by its very vigour, only helped to precipitate the
inevitable disaster. His attacks upon the slave-trade, his
establishment of a government monopoly in ivory, his hostility to
the Egyptian officials, had been so many shocks, shaking to its
foundations the whole rickety machine. The result of all his
efforts had been, on the one hand, to fill the most powerful
classes in the community-- the dealers in slaves and, ivory--
with
a hatred of the government, and on the other to awaken among the
mass of the inhabitants a new perception of the dishonesty and
incompetence of their Egyptian masters.
When, after Gordon's removal, the rule of the Pashas once more
asserted
itself over the Sudan, a general combustion became inevitable:
the first
spark would set off the blaze. Just then it happened that
Mahommed Ahmed,
the son of an insignificant priest in Dongola, having quarrelled
with the
Sheikh from whom he was receiving religious instruction, set up
as an
independent preacher, with his headquarters at Abba Island, on
the Nile,
150 miles above Khartoum.
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