, along with the claret, his first glimpse of the
great and extraordinary schemes with which Kitchener was already
working to avenge the comrade who had fallen in Khartoum. This part of
the work was as personal as that of a private detective plotting
against a private murderer in a modern detective story. Kitchener had
learned to speak the Arab tongue not only freely but sociably. He wore
the Arab dress and fell into the Arab type of courtesy so effectively
that even his blue northern eyes did not betray him. Above all, he
sympathised with the Arab character; and in a thousand places
sprinkled over the map of North-East Africa he made friends for
himself and therefore enemies for the Mahdi. This was the first and
superficially the most individual of the converging plans which were
to checkmate the desert empire; and its effects were very
far-reaching. Again and again, in subsequent years, when the
missionaries of the Mahdist religion pushed northward, they found
themselves entangled among tribes which the English power had not so
much conquered as converted. The legend of the great Prophet
encountered something more elusive than laws or military plans; it
encountered another legend--an influence which also carried the echoes
of the voice of a man. The Ababdeh Arabs, it was said, made a chain
across the desert, which the new and awful faith could not pass. The
Mudir of Dongola was on the point of joining the ever-victorious
Prophet of Omdurman. Kitchener, clad as an Arab, went out almost alone
to speak with him. What passed, perhaps, we can never tell; but
before his guest had even left him the Mudir flew to arms, fell upon
the Prophet's hosts at Korti, and drove them before him.

The second and superficially more solid process of preparation is much
better known. It was the education of the native Egyptian army. It is
not necessary to swallow all the natural jingoism of English
journalism in order to see something truly historic about the English
officer's work with the Fellaheen, or native race of Egypt. For
centuries they had lain as level as the slime of the Nile, and all the
conquerors in the chronicles of men had passed over them like a
pavement. Though professing the challenging creed of the Moslems, they
seem to have reached something like the pessimist patience of the
Hindoos. To have turned this slime once more into a human river, to
have lifted this pavement once more into a human rampart or barricade,
is not