The reasons which forced the peoples of the Soudan to revolt were as strong as the defence which their oppressors could offer was feeble.  Looking at the question from a purely political standpoint, we may say that upon the whole there exists no record of a better case for rebellion than presented itself to the Soudanese.  Their country was being ruined; their property was plundered; their women were ravished; their liberties were curtailed; even their lives were threatened.  Aliens ruled the inhabitants; the few oppressed the many; brave men were harried by cowards; the weak compelled the strong.  Here were sufficient reasons.  Since any armed movement against an established Government can be justified only by success, strength 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