is an important revolutionary
virtue. It was a virtue that the Arabs might boast. They were indeed
far stronger than they, their persecutors, or the outside world had yet
learned. All were soon to be enlightened.

The storm gathered and the waters rose. Three great waves impelled the
living tide against the tottering house founded on the desert sand.
The Arab suffered acutely from poverty, misgovernment, and oppression.
Infuriated, he looked up and perceived that the cause of all his
miseries was a weak and cowardly foreigner, a despicable 'Turk.' The
antagonism of races increased the hatred sprung from social evils. The
moment was at hand. Then, and not till then, the third wave came--the
wave of fanaticism, which, catching up and surmounting the other waves,
covered all the flood with its white foam, and, bearing on with the
momentum of the waters, beat in thunder against the weak house so that
it fell; and great was the fall thereof.

Down to the year 1881 there was no fanatical movement in the Soudan.
In their utter misery the hopeless inhabitants had neglected even
the practices of religion. They were nevertheless prepared for any
enterprise, however desperate, which might free them from the Egyptian
yoke. All that delayed them was the want of some leader who could
combine the tribes and restore their broken spirits, and in the summer
of 1881 the leader appeared. His subsequent career is within the
limits of this account, and since his life throws a strong light on the
thoughts and habits of the Arabs of the Soudan it may be worth while to
trace it from the beginning.

The man who was the proximate cause of the River War was born by the
banks of the Nile, not very far from Dongola. His family were poor and
of no account in the province. But as the Prophet had claimed a royal
descent, and as a Sacred Example was sprung from David's line, Mohammed
Ahmed asserted that he was of the 'Ashraf,'(descendants of the Prophet)
and the assertion, since it cannot be disproved, may be accepted.
His father was a humble priest; yet he contrived to give his son some
education in the practices of religion, the principles of the Koran,
and the art of writing. Then he died at Kerreri while on a journey to
Khartoum, and left the future Mahdi, still a child, to the mercies of
the world. Solitary trees, if they grow at all, grow strong; and a boy
deprived of a father's care often develops, if he escape the perils of
youth, an independ