Two years afterwards (1883) a still more formidable rebellion broke out in the Sudan,—­a province held by Egypt. (See map facing p. 428.) The leader of the insurrection styled himself the Mahdi, or great Mohammedan Prophet.  Then (1884) Gladstone sent General Gordon to withdraw the Egyptian troops from Khartoum, the capital of the Sudan.  The Mahdi’s forces shut up the heroic soldier in that city, and before help could reach him, he and all his Egyptian troops were massacred.  No braver or truer man ever died at the post of duty, for in him was fulfilled Wordsworth’s eloquent tribute to the “Happy Warrior."[1]

[1] See Wordsworth’s poems “The Happy Warrior.”

Many years later, Lord Kitchener advanced against the new Mahdi, and at Omdurman his terrible machine guns scattered the fanatical Dervishes, or Mohammedan monks, like chaff before the whirlwind.  The next autumn (1899) the British overtook the fugitive leader of the Dervishes and annihilated his army.

Since then British enterprise, British capital, and American inventive skill have transformed Egypt.  The completion of the great dam across the Nile, at Assouan (1902), regulates the water supply for lower Egypt.  The creation of this enormous reservoir promises to make the Nile valley one of the richest cotton-producing regions in the world.

The “Cape to Cairo” railway, which is more than half finished, is another British undertaking of immense importance. (See map opposite.) When ready for traffic, through its whole length of nearly six thousand miles, besides its branch lines, it will open all Eastern Africa, from the Cape of Good Hope to the Mediterranean, to the spread of commerce and civilization.

623.  The Boers; the Boer War, 1899; Death of Queen Victoria (1901).

The history of the British in South Africa has been even more tragic than their progress in Egypt (S622).

In the middle of the seventeenth century (1652) the Dutch took possession of Cape Colony. (See map opposite.) Many Boers, or Dutch farmers, and cattle raisers emigrated to that far distant land.  There they were joined by Huguenots, or French Protestants, who had been driven out of France.  All of them became slaveholders.  Early in the nineteenth century (1814) England purchased the Cape from Holland.  Twenty years later the English Parliament bought all the negroes held by the Boers and set them free.

Eight thousand Boers, disgusted with the loss of their slaves and with the small price they had received for them, left the Cape (1836) and pushed far northward into the wilderness.  Crossing the Orange River, they founded the “Orange Free State.”  Another party of Boers, going still further north, crossed the Vaal River (a tributary of the Orange) and set up the Transvaal, or “South African Republic,” on what was practically a slaveholding foundation.  Later (1852), England, by a treaty known as the Sand River Convention, virtually recognized the independence of the settlers in the Transvaal, and two years afterwards made a still more explicit recognition of the independence of the Orange Free State.