ry tribes to
submission. With inflexible severity he broke the power of the chiefs
who still carried on trade in slaves. He freed numbers of black captives
and drilled them as soldiers, for his own fighting men were the scum of
Egypt and Syria. With a handful of men he dealt his blows at the weakest
points of the enemy's defence and thus always gained the victory. In
four months he suppressed the revolt and checked the power of the
slave-dealers.

Gordon had now cleared all the west of the Sudan, and only Dara in
southern Darfur remained to be dealt with. There the most powerful
slave-dealers had collected to offer resistance. He came down one day
like lightning into their camp. They might easily have killed him--it
was he who had ruined their trade in black ivory. He went unconcernedly
among the tents, and they did not dare to touch him. And when his own
troops arrived, he summoned all the chiefs to his tent and laid his
conditions before them. They were to lay down their arms and be off each
to his own home; and one by one they obeyed and went away without a
word.

But the slave-trade was a weed too deeply rooted in the soil to be
eradicated in a single day, and the revolt and troubles which constantly
arose out of this horrible traffic gave Gordon no peace. He left the
Sudan at the end of 1879, and the next two years were occupied with work
in India, China, Mauritius, and South Africa. Meanwhile remarkable
events had occurred in Egypt. Great Britain had sent vessels and troops
to the land of the Khedive, and had taken over the command and the
responsibility. The chief of the dervishes, Mohamed Ahmed, whom we
remember on the small island in the Nile, proclaimed that he was chosen
by God to relieve the oppressed, that he was the Mahdi or Messiah of
Islam. Discontent prevailed among the Mohammedans throughout the Sudan,
for Egypt had at length prohibited the slave-trade, and the Mahdi
collected all the discontented people and tribes under his banner. His
aim was to throw off the yoke of Egypt. Proud and arrogant, he sent
despatches through the whole of the Sudan, and his summons to a holy war
flew like a prairie fire over North Africa.

The British Government, which was now responsible for Egypt, was in a
difficulty. The Sudan must either be conquered or evacuated, for the
Egyptian garrisons were still at Khartum and at several places even down
to the equator. The Government decided on evacuation, and Gordon was
sen